The History of Bees by Maja Lunde
My interest in bees is fairly new. Up until about 3 years ago, my only reaction to bees was the painful memory of being stung in my ear by a bee as a kid, and how much it hurt! As I started to garden at my house, I would walk outside and notice the butterflies and bees flitting around my flowers, and I was happy--as long as they stayed away from me. That slight awareness of bees became an interest when I stumbled upon urban beekeeping articles as I was searching for a paper topic in grad school. From then on, I was interested in bees, and horrified at the mysterious deaths that are sending our bee population into a nosedive. All of that back history drove me to pick up this book at my library. This novel is told in three separate historical settings: William, a biologist in 1852 England, George, a beekeeper in 2007 Ohio, and Tao, a human pollinator in 2098 China. In Tao's world, the bees have disappeared; world population has plummeted due to fo...