CALL THE BEE DOCTOR!

Markle provides a heartening update on honeybee health.

When she was researching her book The Case of the Vanishing Honeybees (2013), as Markle recalls in her author’s note, bees’ “future looked grim.” But apiologists, the titular “bee doctors,” have been hard at work, first trying to understand the colony losses that devastated U.S. apiaries in the mid-2000s. Realizing that there was not one cause but a combination, they then turned to creating a kaleidoscope of solutions: developing honey bee vaccines, concocting nutritional supplements, and breeding parasite-resistant bees. As in her earlier book, Markle emphasizes science as a process, and she respects her readers’ curiosity enough to get fairly technical with both vocabulary—readers will appreciate the closing glossary—and descriptions of some experiments. For her research, she went straight to the apiologists conducting this critical work; one measure of this field’s cutting-edge nature is that she cites her interviews rather than publications as sources. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of what she calls the “honey bee–plant partnership.” Explaining clearly how climate change is an immediate threat, she empowers readers with practicable tips to help. Photographs, some quite astonishing, accompany the text, along with captions that provide further informational enrichment.

An important peek into how scientists work to solve big problems.