I wanted to follow up on the CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) discussions with some reading recommendations.

If you want to learn more about being a beekeeper, living in the country, and letting nature define the rhythyms of your life, you just can’t do better than Sue Hubbell’s “A Book of Bees.” Kirkus described it as a mix of “memoir, nature journal, and beekeeping manual.” Hubbell’s writing reminds me of another great country life writer, Anne Dillard. (If you haven’t read Dillard’s An American Childhood, read it now!)

If you want a more detailed discusson of pollination, but also a good read, I recommend “The Forgotten Pollinators” by Buchmann and Nabhan. This winner of several science writing awards discusses the relationship between plants and the many different animals they depend on for reproduction. Unfortunately, many endangered species are rare plants depending on rare insects–not a recipe for a stable ecosystem.

I’ll quote a little from E. O. Wilson’s forward to The Forgotten Pollinators:

“Great truths are sometimes so enveloping and exist in such plain view as to be invisible. One of them is the dominance on the land of flowering plants and insects. …There is a welded chain of causal events that leads directly to our species: if plants, including many food and forage crops, as well as natural floras, must have insects to exist, then humans must have insects to exist. And not just one or two kinds of insects, such as the friendly and lovable honeybees, but lots of insect species, vast numbers of them. ”