I finished "Raising Resilient Bees" yesterday, and I am going to qualify my previous gushing somewhat, but I still would highly recommend this book. The thing that I liked so much about it was it interlocks beekeeping into the regenerative biodynamic permaculture homestead philosophy in a way that was very inspiring and helpful to me on a broad level. It's in a sense a treatise on a better more sustainable way to keep bees in the modern world, and I found the author's personal goals and philosophy to very much align with my own, which made all the information applicable to me, even though I'm a hobbyist and not a commercial beekeeper.
That being said, some of the standards set by the authors were unrealistically high. For example, they were so concerned about their bee products being 100% organic that they don't use paint on their hives for fear a chip of paint might accidentally enter the honey or propolis. While I applaud their integrity, I'm not anywhere near that concerned about something so minor, but as a beekeeper who has her feet under her already, I could easily weed out what was important to me and what was not from a management perspective. For this reason though, I wouldn't recommend this book to a beginner, because it would have the potential to make it sound like keeping healthy bees and harvesting quality products from your hives is unattainably difficult, due to the incredibly high standards the authors set for themselves.
Speaking of which, I really liked how the authors understood their audience and tailored the information toward more experienced beekeepers. This book is not a "how to" introduction for newbees, and the authors deliberately didn't retread ground they assumed a beekeeping audience already understood, which made the information succinct and straightforward, while still being personal, conversational, and easily readable. The book also contained some really good up-to-date information on things like the medicinal value of bee products. And of course, since it's from Chelsea Green, the book is well set up, well bound, and contains lots of great photographs.
My only other complaints would be the aforementioned confusion about what box size the authors are actually using, because I'm still not sure, and they displayed a contempt toward crystallized honey that was startling to me at times, calling it "ruined" and "foul" in two separate instances. I understand that commercial honey producers don't like to see crystallized honey, but for a book so interested in natural hive products, this was an out-of-place opinion to be disseminated so strongly.
All that to say, I give it a 5/5, and I'm thinking about implementing some of the authors' suggestions this upcoming season. For any late-beginner to experienced beekeeper, I would highly recommend it.
