About the book:

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

Beekeeper and garden historian Lotte Moeller 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 Moeller encounters a trigger-happy Californian beekeeper raging against both killer bees and bee politics, warring beekeepers on the Danish island of Laeso, 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 - Sweden's Gardening Book of the Year 2019, shortlisted for the August Prize 2019.

About the author:

Lotte Moeller is a Swedish writer and journalist, and author of a number of classics in cultural and garden literature including a monograph on the lemon, which was shortlisted for the August Prize for Best Non-Fiction. She has also been a beekeeper.

Giving this book as a present? We can include a personal message from you, handwritten on one of our illustrated Heywood Hill postcards free of charge.  Write your message in the 'notes' box at the checkout. If you would like the book gift-wrapped in our famous livery, also free of charge, just let us know.