Are you interested in beekeeping? Are you curious how adding bees can help your yard and garden? The Davenport Public Library has books to help you out! Below we have gathered a list of nonfiction books about beekeeping, plus a bonus cozy mystery about bees, to get you started.
At the time of this writing, all of these titles are owned by the Davenport Public Library. Descriptions provided by the publishers.
The Backyard Beekeeper: an Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in your Yard and Garden 5th Edition by Kim Flottum
A Comprehensive Guide to Keeping Healthy, Happy, and Productive Bees.
Experience the timeless joy of beekeeping—right in your backyard or on your urban rooftop—with this fully updated and accessible resource for beekeepers of all levels.
More than just a how-to guide, The Backyard Beekeeper offers expert insights and practical advice on every aspect of caring for bees and harvesting their gifts. Learn how to:
- Set Up and Maintain Hives – Start and care for thriving colonies.
- Choose the Ideal Location – Ensure the safety of your bees and yourself.
- Practice Nontoxic Beekeeping – Use natural, sustainable care methods.
- Manage Swarms – Prevent and control swarming behavior.
- Work with Top Bar Hives – Explore alternative hive options.
- Harvest Hive Products – Collect honey, beeswax, and more.
- Identify and Treat Bee Health Issues – Recognize problems early and apply effective solutions.
What’s New in the 5th Edition:
- Natural Beekeeping Methods – Learn how to insulate hives for winter, mirroring the natural advantages of wild bee habitats.
- Updated Treatments for Varroa Mites – Stay ahead in the fight against one of beekeeping’s greatest challenges.
- Guidance on New Antibiotic Regulations – Navigate the latest recommendations for managing American foulbrood.
- Modern Recordkeeping Tools – Discover innovative ways to track hive health and productivity.
This expanded edition also features a fresh, user-friendly design with larger, easy-to-read text, a clearer structure for quick reference, and dozens of new, vibrant photos that bring beekeeping to life.
With trusted guidance from Kim Flottum, editor emeritus of Bee Culture magazine, you’ll gain the confidence and know-how to cultivate healthy, productive bees and enjoy the sweet rewards of your own hive.
Start your beekeeping journey today—naturally, sustainably, and successfully. – Quarry Books
Beekeeping for Gardeners: the Complete Step-to-Step Guide to Keeping Bees in your Garden by Richard Rickitt
A comprehensive gardener’s guide to sustainable beekeeping.
Beekeeping has changed. While once it was a hobby that pursued the rich rewards of honey and wax, many new beekeepers now instead seek the gratification of knowing that they are aiding the survival of one of the world’s most important creatures. Keeping bees today is as much about providing the right habitats and resources to help pollinators thrive as it is about chasing every drop of golden honey.
This beautifully illustrated guide to the ancient hobby of beekeeping shows today’s gardeners how to create beautiful gardens that are richly rewarding for people and bees alike. Flowers, shrubs, trees and vegetable plots can provide colourful beauty and delicious produce as well as vital pollen and nectar when bees need it the most. There are lists of the top-performing plants and how and where to grow them, including window boxes, lawns, borders, wild gardens and even ponds.
Beekeeping for Gardeners looks at the pleasures and benefits of keeping honey bees in gardens of all types and sizes, both rural and urban. It explains the practicalities involved in keeping bees in the domestic garden setting, as well as on rooftops, allotments, parks, farmland and other locations. Importantly, and unlike any book before, this guide sets the delightful hobby of beekeeping within the context of the wider environment, asking how it can best serve the needs of all types of pollinator and the local ecology in general.
Whether you’re looking to attract more bumblebees and solitary bees or want to install a beehive, this wonderful book contains all the guidance you’ll need to have a garden buzzing with bees. – Green Books
Buzz: the Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson
Bees are like oxygen: ubiquitous, essential, and, for the most part, unseen. While we might overlook them, they lie at the heart of relationships that bind the human and natural worlds. In Buzz, the beloved Thor Hanson takes us on a journey that begins 125 million years ago, when a wasp first dared to feed pollen to its young. From honeybees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies, and our very existence. They’ve given us sweetness and light, the beauty of flowers, and as much as a third of the foodstuffs we eat. And, alarmingly, they are at risk of disappearing.
As informative and enchanting as the waggle dance of a honeybee, Buzz shows us why all bees are wonders to celebrate and protect. Read this book and you’ll never overlook them again. – Basic Books
A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees by Helen Jukes
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as the author is entering her thirties and feeling disconnected in her life. Uneasy about her future and struggling to settle into her new house in Oxford with its own small garden, she is brought back to a time of accompanying a friend in London—a beekeeper—on his hive visits. And as a gesture of good fortune for her new life, she is given a colony of honeybees. According to folklore, a colony, freely given, brings good luck, and Helen Jules embarks on a rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper.
Jukes writes about what it means to “keep” wild creatures; on how to live alongside beings whose laws and logic are so different from our own . . . She delves into the history of beekeeping and writes about discovering the ancient, haunting, sometimes disturbing relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing.
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is a book of observation, of the irrepressible wildness of these fascinating creatures, of the ways they seem to evade our categories each time we attempt to define them. Are they wild or domestic? Individual or collective? Is honey an animal product or is it plant-based? As the author’s colony grows, the questions that have, at first compelled her interest to fade away, and the inbetweenness, the unsettledness of honeybees call for a different kind of questioning, of consideration.
A subtle yet urgent mediation on uncertainty and hope, on solitude and friendship, on feelings of restlessness and on home; on how we might better know ourselves. A book that shows us how to be alert to the large and small creatures that flit between and among us and that urge us to learn from this vital force so necessary to be continuation of life on planet Earth. – Pantheon
Bonus Cozy Mystery!
Take the Honey and Run by Jennie Marts (book 1 in the Bee Keeping Mystery series)
As a successful mystery author, Bailey Briggs writes about murder, but nothing prepares her for actually discovering the dead body of the founder of her hometown of Humble Hills, Colorado. Bailey grew up at Honeybuzz Mountain Ranch and was raised by her beekeeping grandmother, Blossom Briggs, aka Granny Bee, and her two eccentric sisters, Aster and Marigold—which is why she drops everything to come home and help Granny Bee after a bad fall.
A broken foot doesn’t stop her grandmother from ruling The Hive, her granny’s book club, or continuing to prepare and package her bee-inspired products. But when Bailey’s grandmother’s infamous “Honey I’m Home” hot spiced honey turns out to “bee” the murder weapon and her granny is now the prime suspect, Bailey has no choice but to use her fictional detective skills to help solve the murder and “smoke out” the real culprit.
With the help of Bailey’s witty bestie, a pair of meddling aunts, the feisty members of The Hive, and her computer-savvy daughter, this amateur sleuth is determined to solve the case. A malicious attack and an ominous threat reveal that someone wants Bailey to butt out of the investigation, but there’s no way she’s backing down. She must use her skills to uncover the truth and catch the clever culprit before her grandmother ends up bee-hind bars. – Crooked Lane Books
“There were books everywhere. Hundreds of books. Thousands of books. There were books of every size, shape, and color. They lined the walls from floor to ceiling, standing straight and rigid as soldiers on the polished mahogany shelves, the gilt lettering on their worn spines glinting in the soft light, the scent of supple leather and aging paper filling the air.”
