Honey Bees

Phil Lester's first book, The Vulgar Wasp, was about one of the world's most hated insects. His second is about just the opposite - the honey bee, arguably one of our best-loved six-legged creatures. People have revered honey bees for centuries. Today we celebrate them with toys, postage stamps and campaigns to raise awareness; we dress up in large bee suits to protest the use of pesticides; we've even sent bees into space and watched as they adjusted to microgravity.

Honey. Drizzled over a slice of fresh bread… or eaten directly from the spoon… is one of life’s great pleasures. And with beehives springing up on urban rooftops, in next door’s back garden – even schemes for adopting bees or renting hives – becoming a honey producer seems… possible. So how easy is it and what’s involved?

Honey Bees: Estimating the Environmental Impact of Chemicals is an updated account of the different strategies for assessing the ecotoxicity of xenobiotics against these social insects, which play a key role

The honey bee is a willing conscript, a working wonder, an unseen and crucial link in America's agricultural industry. But never before has its survival been so unclear—and the future of our food supply so acutely challenged.

The world is experiencing a global bee crisis, and with bees responsible for almost a third of the food on our plate, this is a crisis that could affect us all. In the winter of 2013, areas of Europe lost up to 53% of their bee population. Similar decline has been recorded in the US. Astonishingly, Australia is the only country in the world where the bee population continues to thrive. As commercial beekeepers are pushed out of business abroad, Australian bees are exported to pollinate foreign farmlands. However, the fate of Australian bees hangs in the balance. It seems that the bee crisis is intricately tied to the way we have changed our planet.