Planting for Honeybees

 

Shirley J.                 Adult Non-Fiction        What to plant in your home garden to be BEE friendly

Planting for Honeybees: The Grower's Guide to Creating a Buzz by Sarah Wydham-Lewis  144 pages

Excellent book in this age of diminishing numbers of honeybees due to pesticides, lack of habitat - accessible flowering plants and man's lack of understanding of the important role they play in the scheme of life on earth paraphrasing the quote from Einstein if the honeybees die so will we (humans).  There are 20,000 known species of bees but only 8 of those are honeybees!   Honeybees have shorter tongues to dip into flowers than other bees so their skills are found in an increasingly shorter and shorter amount of plants they can actually work with.   This book explains the best plants to support the diligent work of the honeybee hives and the best for each of the four seasons as honeybees will work year round if they can tolerate the weather and find useable plant sources.   This is an easy to read, easy to understand book that developed from a pamphlet the author produced and handed out at her lectures and through botanical and bee-keeping societies.   A wonderful resource in making the already difficult like of the poor foraging honeybee so much better and the honey produced superb.   Honey has been a source of food, medicine and vitamin staple since man's first endeavor to explore the joys of honey.  This book will open the reader's eyes to how benevolence on our part by planting bee friendly botanicals goes a long way in saving the species as well as the world and mankind.   A most excellent book.  I recommend this to grade-schoolers on up - everyone who wants to help the world and bee a hero.