Holy cow, this "Bees in America" book is atrocious. I NEVER, EVER, NEVER don't finish a book. It can be boring, extremely long, poorly written, and I always finish it. I can literally count on one hand the books I have started and not finished in my entire lifetime. But this book is going to be one of them. And this is the first time I've had it be apparent that I can't finish a book after reading only one chapter.
The reason I always finish a book is that you never know what little good nugget might be hidden in there somewhere. The problem is this book is so full of all sorts of things that I know aren't true, that I can't trust any word it says. A few examples.
Pg. 20: "Because English settlers did not recognize or acknowledge Native American agricultural patterns already in place, they fundamentally changed the landscape by bringing cows, bees, apple trees, and even, inadvertently, mice."
Passing over that strange reference to Native American agriculture, while it is true that the house mouse was brought inadvertently to the New World from Europe, it had very little effect on the ecosystem, since there were already mice in the New World. And while cattle very much affected the West, I can't see how they affected colonial America in any great ecological manner. (This book was oddly obsessed with referencing cattle frequently, even though it's a completely irrelevant topic.)
Pg. 23: "Good wives had legal rights in colonial America and had more freedom than nineteenth-century women had. They often shouldered the responsibilities of farms and shops when men were away at sea or on trips. . . . Certainly, according to scholar David Freeman Hawke, the colonist's wife 'still performed a number of fixed duties as in England . . . . But her role was no longer limited to household chores . . . she now became her husband's partner in the fields.' When the English colonies merged with New Amsterdam in 1664, the term good wife took on even more possibilities because Ditch women had more freedom than English women."
This is a meaningless paragraph. It analyzes the female workforce of the 1600s as if it's comparable to a more modern era, where women are supposedly not "allowed" to work because women are supposed to only stay at home and do domestic things. It completely fails to recognize that eking a subsistence living out of the wilderness required all hands on deck just so the family wouldn't starve over the winter, and had nothing to do with what women were or were not "allowed" to do.
Pg. 29: "A Mennonite Quaker from the Rhine Valley named Francis Daniel Pastorius crossed to Pennsylvania in 1683."
One cannot physically be a Mennonite and Quaker at the same time. That would be like saying Pastorius was an Episcopalian Mormon. The two sects are completely unrelated. Plus Wikipedia says he was a Lutheran.
On top of all this, the book is very poorly written. This is a particularly bad paragraph.
"During the seventeenth century, Africa supplied the world's largest amount of beeswax, although its value was ignored initially in tribal economies. Ironically, before the Portuguese arrived, many Africans threw beeswax away. But when Portugal conquered large areas on Africa to provide slaves for their sugar plantations in Brazil, the Africans adopted the word candle for beeswax, kandir. The Portuguese needed beeswax for two main reasons: church candles and lost-wax molds, which were used to create religious objects and weapons."
All these mildly dubious facts are completely unrelated, especially the sentence about the Africans adopting the Portuguese word for candle. And I'm fairly sure the lost-wax method of casting can create many more things than religious objects and weapons.
So to make a long story short, this book was a total bust. Which is unfortunate because I now don't have a bee book to read. I do have E.O. Wilson's Insect Societies like I mentioned, but a good bit of that is about ants, and I was really in the mood for something a little lighter and less scientific, since I just finished Seeley. Does anyone have any recommendations for a bee book that is a light, easier read, perhaps something memoir-ish?
