The Bees, Laline Paull

The Bees is a novel by Laline Paull, a friend recommended it last year and it sounded interesting enough for me to whip out my phone and order a copy from Amazon right there in the pub, the pub was Pave in case you were wondering. 

Whilst waiting for it's arrival I did a little Google search and found various reviews online gushing about how well researched The Bees is and that it was shortlisted for the 2015 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction. When it hit my doormat I had a quick look at the front and back covers which apart from a rather nice yellow, black and gold colour scheme includes endorsements from three authors and four newspapers, "Gripping" said Margaret Attwood, "Frightening" said the Guardian -making me wonder if they'd maybe read the wrong book... There's some short reviews on the inside front cover, and then another three pages of one paragraph reviews by various people I don't know. The publisher seems very keen to tell you how great and highly acclaimed the novel is before you read it yourself and make up your own mind. Unfortunately, whilst I very much wanted to like the book I have to disagree with all of them.

In the words of Public Enemy:
"Don't Believe the Hype"

The Bees follows the life of Flora 717 from the moment she emerges from her cell onwards. I think the life of a bee certainly has a lot of potential to make an interesting novel, unfortunately Paull seems to know very little about bees. I found an article in the Independent in which Paull says she spent three months reading up on bees in which she read manuals, essays and poems. To be blunt, having read the book I'm more inclined to think she maybe she watched half of Bee Movie before putting finger to keyboard. In the acknowledgements Paull namedrops a number of noted biologists, entomologists and a book on bee anatomy but given the number of mistakes she makes I've got to wonder what she actually talked to them about and if she opened the anatomy book at all.

Whilst it's fair to expect some artistic license in a fictional novel about the life of a bee, Paul goes so far from reality she might as well have written about a colony of hippogriffs, in fact I rather it had been.. In her novel the worker bees are born into separate castes which predetermine their lifelong duties, some being cleaners, nursemaids, guards or whatever. In reality a bees duties depend upon its age. One of the castes seem to be made up of unmated Queens who she gives an important role within the colony alongside the actual Queen, in reality those unmated Queens would've killed their mother and the first to emerge would've probaby killed her sisters too.

Her understanding of bee anatomy seems a bit limited as well. Her bees have actual blood, she mentions it a lot. I'm not sure which edition of The Biology of the Honeybee she looked in but blood is something bees definitely don't have. In insects oxygen is transported in a fluid called haemolymph. as two minutes with Wikipedia will tell you. She also refers to bees making wax, but seems to get that wrong too, writing about liquid wax coming from between cuticle bands when beeswax is actually excreted as flakes from six glands under the bees' abdomen.

She describes Queens fighting but again doesn't seem to get things right. Whilst worker bees have a barbed sting which is why it gets stuck in you Queen Bees completely lack barbs allowing them to dispatch multiple  unhatched rivals. Not Paull's Queens though. For reasons unknown her Queens have extra barbs on their stings.

Her bee behaviour is wrong too. Foraging bees collect from one particular type of food from one partiicular type of  flower at a time. In  Paull's novel, Flora collects nectar and pollen from a dog rose then an echium too, it's probably like going to a scoop shop and bunging everything into the same bag. At one point Flora spends a night sleeping rough and is surprised as she believed no bee could survive a night outside the hive. The fact is it's not unusual for a forager to sleep rough especially if the weather changes. .

As well as having some difficulties with the actual bees she doesn't seem to understands the roles of honey or pollen either. She writes of Flora going to collect pollen to satisfy a craving for carbohydrates. Whilst there are carbs in pollen the bee's main source of carbs is the nectar they collect and make into honey. Pollen is their protein source. I also noticed Paull makes no mention of the fact bees need to dilute honey with water to consume it either, in her novel the bees are eating it neat.

It's not only the bees Paull seems to be getting wrong. There are wasps too. In this novel the wasps bleed green blood ..in reality wasps, like bees, have haemolymph not blood, and it's not green. She also seems to think wasp venom is formic acid. Poor research again. There's formic acid in bee and ant venom but wasp venom is alkali, the complete opposite. Two minutes with Wikipedia would've avoided that mistake.

It's not just entomology Paull struggles with. Ornithology seems a problem area too. Her Crows have red eyes, well unless there's some albinism or something very wrong with them Crows eyes definitely aren't red. At one point she also mentions the scent of a crow's sweat. That would be quite something to experience given birds don't actually have sweat glands. Crow sweat doesn't exist.

There's a mouse. She describes it as having red eyes, again unless there's some kind of albinism mice don't have red eyes.. She refers to it's hundreds of whiskers drawing in scent ..well whiskers don't actually draw in scent, being nothing but thick hairs, and mice don't have hundreds of them anyway. She also describes its "long scaly tail," although mouse tails are covered in fur.

Unfortunately it's not just insects, birds and animals that Paull doesn't seem to have properly researched, it's beekeepers too. The beekeeper in her novel makes an appearance removing frames of honey straight into a plastic bag whilst bare foot and wearing a red dressing gown. Sounds a good way to get stung in exciting new places before getting home with a carrier bag full of bees. She later describes the removed honey comb as 'wet walls of wealth' but they're only wet when the honey is unripe and it's unlikely a beekeeper will be taking unripe honey as it has a very short shelf life before fermenting. When honey is ripe and ready to be removed the cells are covered in wax cappings, dry wax cappings. Dry waxy walls of wealth perhaps, but not wet ones.

I don't know why she decides to give her crows and mice red eyes or the beekeeper a red dressing gown but it really grated with me as it suggests she's missed another noteworthy bee fact: Bees can't actually see the colour red. To them it appears black. Curiously she's aware they can see ultra violet. at the other end of the colour spectrum though.

Whilst the Independent article wrote of beekeepers being impressed with her "accurate depiction of the secret world of the hive" this beekeeper certainly wasn't. If you still feel you want to read The Bees then go for it but I'd strongly advise skipping the blurb on the back as it gives away the plot completely.. and obviously try to forget anything you know about bees, wasps, birds or mice.

Making Candles & Soaps for Dummies

The For Dummies series of books started in the early 90's and was originally focused on I.T. Pretty quickly the black and yellow covers became regular features on every IT professional's bookshelf. Since then the range has been expanded to cover other topics from martial arts to music to maths, science and history. They've consistently been a good start point for everything from C Programming to Ukulele playing and there's about ten Dummies tomes on my bookshelves at the moment. So naturally when I decided to look at expanding my bee products to include soaps the first place I looked was Making Candles & Soaps for Dummies by Kelly Ewing.

Making Candles not Soaps for Dummies would've been more apt.

Unfortunately after years of using For Dummies books and having always found them excellent start and reference points it seems I've found the exception. Making soap involves adding lye to oils, I'm not going to pretend to understand the science of the saponification process but basically the lye acts on the oil turning it into soap. There's a couple of ways this can be done, either slowly at room temperature (cold process) or faster in a heated vessel (hot process). Different types of oil require different amounts of lye at different concentrations, then there's mixing different oils too and superfatting to consider - you could literally write a book on just that. However Kelly writes off cold process soap making as too dangerous on page 5 and makes no mention of hot process soap making at all.

I thought it a bit strange that a book on making soap completely fails to tell the reader how to make actual soap so I did a little googling and found that in the original Candle and Soap Making for Dummies Kelly had included instructions for cold process soap making but included a mistake in the order ingredients were combined to make the lye solution putting people at risk of burns from the exothermic reaction. As a result the Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled the book in 2003. This version I have is copyrighted in 2005 and the safety issue seems to have been addressed by simply removing the who topic and calling it to dangerous rather than just correcting the mistake which would've only needed a note to say: When making lye always add the Sodium Hyroxide to the water never the otherway round. Seems a bit overkill to me and really undermines the book. 

So, instead of writing about actual soap making there's a couple of chapters given over to melt and pour soaps and remilling soaps. Melt and Pour is simply buying ready made soap, melting it adding a few things if you like and pouring it into a mould, remilling is grating existing soap, adding water then remolding that too. Neither technique involves making your own soap. Basically it's tweaking and reshaping existing soap which is quite obviously not "making." There's some info on adding essential oils, fragrances, colours and other additives to the soap but that's pretty much your lot.

I wasn't really interested in the candle making chapters which make up the bulk of the book but had a look anyway. Whilst the authors was risk averse to the point of removing soap making she thinks nothing of decorating a wax candle held in one hand with a hot glue gun held in the other.. Don't think I'd be too comfortable sat near a burning candle decorated with hot glue to be honest -normally hot glue is non toxic but manufacturers warn that overheated it breaks down releasing different compounds that I don't think I'd want to sit in a cloud of.

The book does tell you how to make dipped, moulded and rolled beeswax candles and the section on wicks looks pretty comprehensive, there's also quite a lot on decorating candles and sections on scents and aromatherapy so people may get some use out of it although not probably enough to justify the cover price. Other missing topics include tallow which is easily made at home and has been used for both candle and soap making for a good five thousand years. I also didn't see any mention of Soy Wax either, which may be due to the age of the original text.

The brief About the Author sections notes that Kelly co-authored a few IT For Dummies books The Internet All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies which has her name on the cover as well as having edited more than 75 books on different subjects. Whilst the author describes candle and soap making as a hobby my impression was that the book is made up of information that was collated for the sake of the book rather than written from personal experience and first hand knowledge accrued over time. The mistake with the lye making instructions in the original version is so basic (and dangerous..) that I don't really believe anyone familiar with the process would have published it.

So whilst I've normally found the For Dummies range really useful, as my bookshelf can attest, this book is the lemon in the series. Whilst it's apparently aimed at the beginner and the seasoned craft person I don't think it has enough information for either when it comes to soap making.

Bees At The Bottom Of The Garden

It's snowing. The bees are staying in their hives leaving me with very little to blog about so it's time for a little winter filler in the form of another little book review.

My introduction to beekeeping was a 2 day course run by Beverley Beekeepers Association in 2010, they recommended we read Bees At the Bottom Of The Garden by Alan Campion. I'd already started reading Get Starting In Beekeeping though so decided to finish that first. Bees At The Bottom Of The Garden (which I'm now going to call BATBOTG because in these RSI concious times I'm not going to type that lot anymore than I need to) seems to be pitched at a slightly simpler level than Get Started In Beekeeping (GSIB!) and so may be an easier read or it may be that it was less new to me having read the other book first.

The start of many a journey

BATBOTG certainly has more images than GSIB with a large number of illustrations and black and white photographs for those who like to look at pictures, although not all of them do say a thousand words and many are there for aesthetic rather than instructional reasons. The book starts with a little information on bee biology then goes onto explaining the components of a hive, then it takes you through the beekeeping year including extracting the honey, before going into a bit more detail about oil seed rape, managing swarming and bee diseases. It probably does tell you enough to keep your own bees but a bit more reading and internet research would be an idea -that said I don't imagine anyone's likely to read a single book then run out to buy some bees.

Originally published in  1984 and reissued in 1990 the copy I got hold of was revised in 2000, published in 2001 and seems to be the latest version. Just like other books I've read it has a year planner for beekeepers telling you more or less what you should be doing in any given month -which in January is not a lot. Worth a read, definitely a good starting point for anyone wanting bees in their garden and if you want to learn more afterwards you can go to something more in depth like Ted Hooper's Guide to Bees & Honey which seems to be something of a beekeeper's bible at the moment.

Bee Keeping: Inspiration and Practical Advice For Would-be Smallholders

Half way through a so far very mild winter and after a few shortlived freezing spells the weather is finally getting down the traditional winter business of being bloody cold. Whilst people start their days scraping ice off car windscreens and heading to work the bees continue to do very little. Leaving me with nothing to write about.. so..

Another day another book review! Don't worry I'll keep it brief.

I was given a copy of Beekeeping as a gift by a jolly nice friend. It's published by Country Living for The National Trust this is one very attractive book. It has a yellow and black hardback cover with an olde worlde schoole booke feele to it. It's nicely laid out with colour and black and white hand drawn illustrations. As with Get Started In Beekeeping and Bees At the Bottom Of The Garden this is an introduction to beekeeping telling you how to kit yourself out and manage bees for a year, however this was written in 2007 making it more recent than either of the other two. It also has an RRP a couple of quid less than the others as well.

Inspirational and Practical Advice

-in one handy volume!

It's actually the shortest of the three books and starts with a still relevant quote for the cost of a starter beekeeping kit (hive, tools and safety gear) -afterall that's probably something worth knowing up front when deciding whether you want to continue reading about beekeeping or not. As with the other books the author, or possibly authors as it seems to be credited to an editor with no individual authors mentioned, it tells you how to start up in beekeeping, maintain your bees and harvest your/their honey. There's less science in this book than the others but TBH you probably don't really need to know the names of the each stage of a bee's gut straight away.

I've found myself referring back to this pleasant little volume a number of times in the past year and towards the end there's a month by month detailing of the beekeeper's year telling you what you should be doing and when. The entry for January doesn't say "pad out your blog with book reviews" which is quite a glaring ommission but it's still handy as a quick reference.

Meditation And The Art Of Beekeeping

I recently finished reading Meditation And The Art Of Beekeeping  by Mark Magill so thought I'd write a quick review. I'd not previously heard of the author but  he also wrote wrote Why Is Buddha Smiling -I'm guessing the answer probably isn't because Blink 182 named their 1998 album after him, but I've not read it so I can't be certain.. He's a contributor to Tricycle: the Buddhist Review amongst other things, wrote the film Waiting For The Moon, which won an award at the 1987 sundance Film Festival but really doesn't look like my cup of tea, and produced Far From Poland, a 1984 docudrama about Polish exiles from what I can gather -sounds almost as exciting as this blog. He also keeps bees, and meditates.

The first thing that strikes you about this book is the presentation. Leaping Hare Press have given it an attractive textured hardback cover, spared no expense on the quality of the paper and graced it with attractive endpages. Before you start on the contents the the book is already an attractive object in it's own right. A quick look at their back catalogue shows they've produced a number of books on the themes of mindfullness and meditation twinned with other topics such as Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens and The Art of Mindful Gardening. They also market seedbomb kits and a book on the subject for any budding guerrilla gardeners out there. Interesting. I suspect I may be making a couple more purchases there.

Meditation and the Art of Beekeeping

Having admired the book I then proceeded to read it. Obviously. Meditation and the Art of Beekeeping is an unusual read. It's a blend of autobiography, philisophy, history, observations, advice and information, interepersed with extracts from beekeeping texts,poems, plays, philosophical and religious texts from various Dalai Lamas, Shakespeare, Reverend Langstroth, Virgil, Emily Dickinson, Lao Tzu and Buddha amongst others.

Magil writes with a laidback easygoing style -just as you could reasonably expect from a proponent of meditation. He also keeps it interesting, so much so that I read the whole this cover to cover book in about 4 sessions, that said it's not the longest book in the world, weighing in at 135 generously spaced pages. He explains the ancient practice of 'bee lining' which was how mankind used to locate honey from wild bees -and no doubt something I'll be slipping into an entry about on here at somepoint. He also explains why honey keeps so long and why bacteria and yeast can't live in it. He explains that darker honey has more antioxidants in it than lighter honey which I found particularly interesting given the two very different shades of my harvest. He tells us of a chance meeting with an old beekeeper that led to work. There's an explanation of the bee politics used in colony descision making -yes they had democracy long before we did. He tells us of losing bees over winter and how he has to order new colonies annually  -something I'm hoping to avoid but time will tell. There's also the problems of black bears and New York City Health Code's article 161.01.

Something else Magill writes about is Brother Adam's Paradox, quoting the old monk's own thoughts on the topic. Something I'd not heard mentioned anywhere else so far. Since Brother Adam's hybridisation programme which successfully created the Buckfast Bee  following the decimation of the United Kingdoms native black bees, by tracheal mite, hybrid bees are now replacing the original breeds of bees all over the world meaning an actual reduction in bio diversity.

As the title suggests the book isn't solely about keeping bees, it's also about meditation. Magill outlines the differences between concentrative and mindful meditation and a little about how to engage in them. However the book isn't really a "how to" for meditation, or in fact beekeeping, so assuming it caught your interest you'd need to do some further study to become proficient in either.

It's hard to say who this book is actually aimed at but I'd say it's interesting read for anyone already interested in keeping bees.

Get Started In Beekeeping

The first book I read about Beekeeping was Get Started In Beekeeping  written by Adrian and Claire Waring, from the Teach Yourself series. The Teach Yourself books cover pretty much everything from learning widely spoken languages such as Bulgarian and Tagalog to business skills like Project Management and Stand Up Comedy, so it's no surprise they have a book on beekeeping tucked in there.

Teach Yourself

Get Started In Beekeping eases you into the subject with, first, a one minute overview, written in large letters across two pages. This tells you in the briefest of briefness basically how a bee colony works. If you're still interested you can then read the five minute section which is two pages of normal size print. This tells you a little more about bees, honey and the approximate commercial value of beekeeping in the UK and the USA. At this point assuming you've not attracted the ire of Waterstones staff by brazenly standing reading a book you haven't paid for there's a ten minute section to read.

The ten minute section is three pages of text. The more mathematically able of you are probably thinking this doesn't add up. If two pages of text takes five minutes to read then surely three pages should equate to seven and a half minutes -maybe the Warings need to invest in a copy of Basic Mathematics from the same range. Anyway for the ten minute overview if you're in a Waterstones I suggest taking the book to the in store Costa franchise and ordering a great big latte, then grabbing a comfy seat and table. Then you can read the ten minute overview at your leisure as you sip that frothy combination of cow juice and the world's most popular addictive stimulant. The ten minute section tells you a bit more about what bees actually do and how they do it (hint: it sounds like "making money" has to do with "honey").

After this you've probably finished your latte and can either buy the book and take it home to bore your housemate with interesting honey bee facts or pop it back on the shelf, whip out your smartphone and order a copy from Amazon for just over a fiver -or try your luck with eBay the worlds biggest poundshop.

Written in 2006, this book does pretty much what it says on the metaphorical tin. It's got enough info to get you started in beekeeping, from how to hive your bees and keep them alive all year to harvesting the honey. At the end of each chapter is a section called "10 Things To Remember," whilst you might not remember them all they certainly make it easy to locate points again later on. The last part of the book is a glossary where you can look up things like gimp pins or tropilaelaps without having to wade through the text. It's written in a very accessible way packed with information and diagrams. There's also some colour plates in the middle of the book showing you things like bees, some more bees, another load of bees, a waxmoth larva, various bits of bee feeding stuff, even more bees, honey comb, a bee keeper, some parasites, some bee hives and oh it's another bee. Towards the end is a month by month breakdown of the beekeeping year. I'd reccomend this easy to read tome to anyone wanting to start beekeeping.

The Bad Beekeeper's Club

For me mornings are that time of day when you either wake up late to a screaming alarm and have a mad rush to get to work more or less on time or, at the weekend, that time when you stumble home worse for wear after a heavy night out and crawl into bed. For other people the morning is, I'm told, time to watch some TV. Aside from not having time in the morning I don't own a TV anyway, it's the 21st Century, things have moved on since 1926 and I replaced it with an XBMC pc years ago. Anyway the upshot is that I don't watch breakfast television. If I did I might have had a clue who Bill Turnbull is. But I don't. So I didn't.

Turns out Bill Turnbull is or possibly was a breakfast television presenter. Yes, as if this blog wasn't already exciting enough I'm waffling on about a breakfast TV news reader. It turns out he's also a beekeeper. And it turns out he's written a book. About beekeeping. It's called "The Bad Beekeeper's Club" and it's rather good -except for the bit with Chris Tarrant in it, although as I recall from my television owning, TV License paying days bits of anything with Chris Tarrant in it tended to be a bit pap. Anyway the rest of the book is rather good. It's not another 'how to keep some bees' guide but an autobiographical piece about his beekeeping experiences. Basically it's exactly like this blog, only better written, more interesting and by a bloke who knows a lot more about bees than me.

A Right Riveting Read. Really.

Pleasure, pain, sweat, smoke, killlings, knife wielding bikers, dangerous dogs and amusing anecdotes it's all in there. Ok so it's no World War Z but it's still a good read, if you're interested in bees that is.