Bees and Their Keepers

A beautifully illustrated and thoroughly engaging cultural history of beekeeping – packed with anecdote, humour and enriching historical detail. The perfect gift.

“A charming look at the history of beekeeping, from myth and folklore to our practical relationship with bees” Gardens Illustrated

“An entertaining collation of bee trivia across the millennia” Daily Telegraph

* Sweden’s Gardening Book of the Year 2019 * Shortlisted for the August Prize 2019 * Winner of the Swedish Book Design Award for 2019

Beekeeper and garden historian Lotte Möller explores the activities inside and outside the hive while charting the bees’ natural order and habits. With a light touch she uses her encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject to shed light on humanity’s understanding of bees and bee lore from antiquity to the present. A humorous debunking of the myths that have held for centuries is matched by a wry exploration of how and when they were replaced by fact.

In her travels Möller encounters a trigger-happy Californian beekeeper raging against both killer bees and bee politics, warring beekeepers on the Danish island of Læso, and Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey, breeder of the Buckfast queen now popular throughout Europe and beyond, as well a host of others as passionate as she about the complex world of apiculture both past and present.

Translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry