The first thing to know about reading Bee Quest is that it’s a fun adventure to several countries, including this one, made new again through Dave Goulson’s eyes. You’ll learn all sorts of interesting things without effort because he’s a natural storyteller with a particular gift of understatement that is often laugh-out-loud funny – which you don’t expect from a bee book.
The second thing is that this endearing account of his search for rare bees is also an unofficial travel guide to some extremely appealing places that I don’t even want to mention here, lest they fill up with other adventurous readers this summer, because I’m planning to follow in Goulson’s footsteps to at least one of them. OK: Poland. Also, an amazing-sounding lodge in Ecuador. You’ll have to buy it for more details.
And the third thing is that camouflaged throughout this very entertaining and accessible book about rare bumblebees are some pretty shocking facts about the environment. But there is never the feeling – at least not until literally the last two pages – that Goulson is on a soapbox; he’s too skilful for that, he just lets the evidence speak for itself. So here and there – amid the incantatory poetry of the natural world, the names of flowers, the habits of the animals – are some bits of information that work like the equivalent of the cartoon frying pan in the face.
For instance, I’m thoroughly enjoying the chapter in which he’s searching for the shrill carder bee in the foothills of the Tatra mountains. I’m drinking beer and eating pierogi with him, taking in vivid details of farming methods that are about 100 years behind those of the UK – when all of a sudden we’re into the common agricultural policy and for the first time all those fragments of information make awful sense, because Dave Goulson is so very good at showing how the macro (the laws or the lack of them, the things that are so ungraspably large and hard to think about, such as climate change) affect the micro.
How following the second world war the laudable intention to increase food production led to “the destruction of the European countryside to make way for industrial farming, created huge surpluses of food, flooded the world with cheap subsidised produce, and gave EU farmers an artificial advantage over farmers in developing countries, thus condemning millions of farmers elsewhere in the world to a life of poverty”.
Sit on the fence, why don’t you. But I do really like that he doesn’t, even though he tempers his own thoughts with the rational allowance that “there are often no right answers in conservation”. No matter what scale he’s thinking on, the bee is our key to a greater understanding of the natural world as we humans affect it with our unpredictable and chaotic antics.
I’m worried I’ll make this book sound dry and boring, or depressing – it’s anything but. It’s warmly personal, and stuffed full of the inescapable poetry and beauty of the natural world, as well as details of his many packed lunches, dinners and various beers. He doesn’t so much wear his erudition lightly as pack it away somewhere at the bottom, under the sandwiches. But it is most definitely there. You’ll effortlessly learn about the link between agriculture and empire, between neonicotinoid pesticides, monocultural farming and the decline of honeybees – and about the price of creating a global network of protected areas for most of the endangered species on earth.
Jorn Scharlemann, Goulson’s colleague at Sussex University, recently put this at £42bn a year, which sounds astronomical but, as he points out, “is just 20% of the global annual spend on fizzy drinks, and less than half of what is paid out each year in bonuses to bankers in Wall Street’s investment banks” – to say nothing of the cost of waging wars.
Dave Goulson is generous, he credits his colleagues and PhD students – and he frequently draws on his vivid adventurous childhood, which is always imaginatively close to hand and inspires his writing with unselfconscious freshness. Adventure is not only a word he uses a lot, but something he prizes and wants for everyone. Going on Bee Quest with him puts the natural world within our reach – to enjoy but also to protect. There’s no two ways about it, we have to act in some way, and now, or it will continue to be paved over, sprayed into submission, and restricted to oblivion. But despite this underlying serious awareness, this is a truly positive and empowering read – you close it better informed, filled with poetry, pies and ready to get out there and make a difference.
•Laline Paull’s novel The Bees is published by Fourth Estate. Her new novel, The Ice, is out next month. Bee Quest by Dave Goulson is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UKp&p over £10, onlie orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
