Natural Beekeeping International Forum

[Adam Rose]

I have just finished reading Following the Wild Bees, by Thomas Seeley. It has just been published. I was on the waiting list with amazon.

It's a brilliant distillation of many years experience of bee hunting. The Chapter listing is as follows:
1. Introduction
2. The Bee Box and Other Tools
3. Bee-Hunting Season
4. Timing Bees to Estimate Distance to Home
5. Making Moves Down a Beeline
6. Finding the Bee Tree
7. On Not "Taking Up" the Bee Tree

Each chapter has a mixture of practical advice, amusing story telling, and quite a lot of theory. Obvious Tom Seeley has had to become an expert bee hunter in order to do his research. Most chapters have a number of "Biology Boxes" which are precise, condensed summaries of a lot of his research ( I didn't know that as well as a waggle dance, bees also do a tremble dance, for example ).

I read the book in about a day. I really enjoyed it and would recommend it. It makes me want to try bee hunting, although I would worry that I don't have the carpentry skills or the bee-marking skills to be successful, and I am also wondering where I would find enough forested or semi-forested land without managed bees to make it worthwhile.

Adam.

[ingo50]

I have not yet purchased the book, on my Xmas list. Good reviews on other fora and websites. I just wonder however if it will encourage bee seekers to mess with feral colonies which IMHO should be admired from a distance and left alone as they are a ecological resource and have genetic vigor. Law of unwanted consequences maybe.

[Adam Rose]

Possibly, but a number of factors would suggest this won't be a problem. The whole ethos of the book works against that, particularly the last chapter 'On Not "Taking Up" the Bee Tree'. But also it's not easy, it takes a long time, you have to be pretty well prepared, success is not guaranteed, and the bees you find may be very inaccessible. So I think anyone who does it would be doing it for the right reasons.