Happy World Bee Day! What are some great books about bees and beekeeping books?
Honey bees and native bees have been a huge part of my life and they have inspired or been featured in four of my five books.
World Bee Day is all about raising awareness of these tiny creatures and encouraging efforts to save the bees. I hope that my books and the books of other authors over the years have also added to the knowledge and reverence of these wonderful beings. Bees have brought so much joy and awe to my life and it’s so great to see them celebrated in books.
Bees have an over-sized impact on the planet and humanity through their pollination of plant species, production of delicious and medicinal honey, and the amazing substances of propolis and beeswax. They also have an impact just by watching them go about their beautiful bee ways.
Bees have definitely made their way into my heart, and here’s a quick summary of how bees have made their way into my books too:
Look – It’s Your Book! includes many case studies about successfully self-published books, including the inspirational story of Queensland entomologist Tim Heard’s self-publishing success with The Australian Native Bee Book. This book has won major awards, sold out multiple times and supercharged the awareness of Australian native bees. It’s likely the book will sell up to 50 000 copies based on sales to date. You can find out how Tim approached the writing, publication and marketing of the book in Chapter 11 of Look – It’s Your Book!
Honey Farm Dreaming is my funny and moving memoir about the not-so-simple life on a farm with honey bees and native bees and a menagerie of animals, plants and people. It follows my adventures in over a decade of small farming, keeping bees, creating a native bee sanctuary, selling honey and beeswax balms at farmers markets and shares with readers my favourite beeswax lip and skin balm recipes, honey recipes and plant species to grow that bees love.
Small Farm Success Australia is a bestselling guide to how to make a life and a living on the land. With case studies and interviews from farmers all over Australia, it also includes tips and advice from NSW apiarist and professional beekeeper Daryl Brenton of The Beekeeper. Daryl’s family have been keeping and caring for bees for more than one hundred years and he offers some great advice for would-be beekeepers.
Honeycomb Kids – Big Picture Parenting for a Changing World and to Change the World – In this book which covers all the major issues facing humanity, I use bees as analogy to show how working together as a community we can make great things happen for our kids, family, communities and nations.
What are some other great books that include bees or are books about bees? Here’s the list of the 49 best books about bees as chosen by Friends of the Earth UK.
And for fiction books about bees…have you read any of these?
- The Beekeeper of Aleppo by ChristyLefteri
- The Bees by Laline Paull
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Happy World Bee Day and hope you get a buzz reading (or writing and illustrating!) your next book about bees.
Bee well and #savethebees 🙂