Bees are a key, though not the only, part of the ecological system due to their role in pollination. Without bees, we are told, the world come close to starvation very quickly. In the last few decades the decline of bees, and the collapse of bee colonies, through the little understood "Colony Collapse" has become an issue of mainstream concern. Lunde puts it at the heart of her story which uses three different, and obliquely connected stories to tell a wider tale about how bees have been transformed by humans.
The earliest story is set in the 1850s with a scientist whose efforts to advance understanding of bees and improve their domestication are constantly undermined by his failure to remain at the forefront of scientific knowledge. Wracked by depression and self-doubt, William designs a new beehive, but is distraught to learn it isn't unique or the first. His design however becomes a family heirloom and his descendents become bee keepers in the United States. Interestingly William's depression overcomes his ability to innovate, but Lunde's development of his daughter, Charlotte, as the person who takes things forward and breaks free of England's stiffling atmosphere is one of the high points of the book. William, characteristically dismisses Charlotte's insights. Rather like one of his descendents George.
George is a bee farmer (I use the words deliberately) in the 2000s. He's farming colonies that can make honey, but more importantly because they are part of a wider and utterly irrational part of capitalist agriculture. I've written on this elsewhere, but the monoculture of industrial farming makes it impossible for bees to survive. So capitalism has made it profitable for bee farmers to move thousands of hives across country to artifically pollinate crops. You couldn't make up a better metaphor for the limitations of farming for profit. Unfortunately George is too pigheaded to see this. He also is too pigheaded to understand that his son is the only person who can truly innovate things, but doesn't want anything to do with the bees (or his father).
Finally we have Tao and her family. In China in a future where bees have disappeared she works in near slave conditions to artifically pollinate trees by hand. Its the most dystopian part of the story, and Tao dreams that her son will escape through education. His sudden illness and disappearance sets her on a journey that leads to the "hope" of the novel.
While bees, farming, and colony collapse are the central themes of The History of Bees, the substance of the book comes from the family relationships. Lunde is adept at portrayal of parents who don't understand their children, and whose obsessions blind them to wider issues of family and society. That said, Lunde is also shownig how our attempts to domesticate the undomesticable (is that a word?) drive ecosystems into crisis. The desire to manipulate for profit is what is dooming us - and along the way fathers will fail to understand their children just as they have always done. But the politics and the conclusions aren't developed enough, and the ending is too much of a liberal cop out (with a leader who "also has kids"). Relying on family won't save us. What will save us is the rejection - exemplified by George's son Tom - of capitalist farming and its profit motive.
Nonetheless I enjoyed this novel a lot, despite the appalling insensitivity and blinkered nature of George and William.
Related Reads
Goulson - A Sting in the Tale
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
Ware - On Extinction: Beginning again at the end
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