Bee history
Beekeepers, inventors, writers, forgotten experiments, and the long argument about how bees ought to be kept.
Writing
Books, essays, bees, science, history, and detours.
I tend to start with a question. The useful part is discovering that the first answer is rarely the whole answer.
Book
Bad Beekeeping
Bad Beekeeping is a memoir of my years as a young commercial beekeeper—moving from Pennsylvania to the Canadian prairies, producing honey in Saskatchewan, raising queens in Florida, and learning a trade in which weather, bees, machinery, money, and judgment seldom cooperate at the same time.
The book is about beekeeping, but not only beekeeping. It is also about youth, work, risk, rural places, odd characters, long drives, ambition, and the education that arrives after the mistake.
Themes
Science & ecology
Pollination, native bees, honey bees, climate, plants, pesticides, and the evidence behind popular claims.
People & places
Prairie towns, travel, biography, landscapes, and the cultural worlds that collect around bees.
Articles and archives
Over the years I’ve written for beekeeping magazines and publications in Canada, the United States, Britain, and Germany. A growing portion of my newer work also appears in the Bad Beekeeping Blog and in scripts prepared for the podcast.
This page can later become a selected bibliography rather than an exhaustive list—a dozen pieces that best represent the kind of writer you are now.