The Urban Beekeeper: A Year of Bees in the City, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of The Urban Beekeeper: A Year of Bees in the City, by Steve Benbow, available from Amazon here. See more articles about bees here.

A hugely inspiring, practical diary of urban beekeeping

Steve Benbow’s enormous success with urban beekeeping shows how easy it is to keep bees, whether you’re in the city or the countryside, a beginner or an experienced beekeeper. You’ll never look back once you’ve tasted your very own sticky, golden honey, or lit a candle made from the beeswax from your beehive. Steve Benbow is a visionary beekeeper whose bees forage in parks, cemeteries, along railway lines, and in window boxes, and because of the diversity of the plants and trees in the city, produce far richer honey and greater yields than they would in rural areas.

This fact-filled diary and practical guide to beekeeping follows a year in the life of Steve and his bees and shows how keeping bees and making your own delicious honey is something anyone can do. It is a tempting glimpse into a sunlit lifestyle that starts with the first rays of the morning and ends with the warm glow of sunset, filled with oozing honeycomb, recipes for sensational honey-based dishes, and honey that tastes like sunshine. A hugely affectionate but practical diary of a beekeeper’s year and the immense satisfaction of harvesting your own delicious honey. Read it and join the revolution.

A snap of our hives on the Long Mynd in Shropshire – you can just spot them! Our Mead is with Ling Heather honey pic.twitter.com/ajoLcpAxhc

— Steve Benbow (@Londonhoneyman) June 5, 2015

The Urban Beekeeper: A Year of Bees in the City, reviewed

This is a fun book, very much aimed at being both a practical guide, while also a wry and fun read too. As awareness about bees rises, and their importance to our wider ecosystem, so it makes sense to learn more about what it actually takes to keep bees, and the challenges of doing so as well.

Benbow clearly loves his occupation, and was fortunate when starting out to have a supportive and inspiring mentor. His desire to subsequently create honey in every London postcode must have also been the inspiration for the later Irish goal to have honey in every Dublin postcode too. We also were delighted to read about his long and successful campaign to keep bees on top of blocks of flats in London.

Back in 2000 here in Dublin, in another life, working with Ballymun Regeneration, we suggested putting beehives on top of the flats of Ballymun. This was not something they wished to do in any shape or form, so it was positive and inspiring to read about Benbow’s successful efforts in London.

Hopefully now, with greater environmental awareness and acceptance of the need to be more in harmony with our surroundings it is and will be more possible to have bees in urban settings all over the world.

The book is laid out to both tell his story but also to track through the 12 months of the year with practical tips in terms of what you need to be doing in each month.

And here's a picture of our shop! pic.twitter.com/K2nyKINZpt

— Steve Benbow (@Londonhoneyman) May 31, 2016

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