Perhaps the world didn't really need Another Book on Bees; certainly not one like this

Excerpts from book review, for review purposes only:

> I had great expectations when I learned about this new book with the title “Asian Beekeeping in the 21st Century.” With three renowned bee scientists as editors and a world class publisher – what could go wrong? Unfortunately the answer is: A lot. Let’s follow the title, beginning with “Asian Beekeeping”. The “Asia” of this book consists of a lot of blank spaces: With the sole exception of Nepal, all of South Asia (India) is missing. So what about “the 21st century” in the title? Instead of a comprehensive analysis of current practices and future trends, there are numerous historical passages, for which Eva Crane’s “The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting” (1999) remains unbeaten.

> Is it asking too much to expect an overview of the role of bees in present day agriculture in Asia (the chapter on Vietnam is a positive exception)? Some statistics to begin with, e.g. the global league table for honey producers? The importance of bees for pollination (not only in the context of fruit or vegetable production in and exports from Asia, with specific reference to bumblebees and stingless bees)?  And then there is the final chapter with the grand title “Conclusions and Future Perspectives.” The chapter (including its abstract) is a mere two pages long – and written by four authors ...  How could it happen that these editors, for a renowned publisher, put together such a random collection of articles, and failed to spot basic mistakes ...

> It probably would have been acceptable if the title of the book had been something like “Current Bee Diseases in Some Randomly Selected Asian Countries”: The first chapter “The Overview of Honey Bee Diversity and Health Status in Asia” is 31 pages long – 27 of which are on disease issues – and most chapters after that repeat that information in more or less detail. One summary would have sufficed. Furthermore, the discussions of disease mostly focus on how Asian Apis species transfer disease to the (introduced) A. mellifera. That the introduction of A. mellifera caused (just one example) a total crash of A. cerana e.g. in Coorg in India in the 90s, i.e. that the culprit is A. mellifera, not vice versa, is rarely mentioned.

On the Book Shelf (in: Bee World)
Chantawannakul, Williams, & Neumann’s Book on Asian Beekeeping in the 21st Century
reviewed by Martin Kunz

¶

I commend the author for the scathing review of Asian Beekeeping in the 21st Century. There have been far too many books like this one, cobbled together without regard to continuity, accuracy or accountability. Just a quick example:

> No other area of the world accommodates more managed A. mellifera colonies than Asia (FAO 2014).

The source for this morsel is the FAO’s website. No clues are offered as to how to find the actual statistics. A search of FAO for the term “beekeeping” yields 12,400 results. Narrowing it down to “world beekeeping statistics” yields No Results. In other words, we just have to take their word for it.

Then … 
> Colonies were widely imported first to Russia from North America, Europe, and Oceania in the late 1700s.

Apis mellifera imported to Russia from Oceania? According to my understanding,  

> In eastern Russia there was a long-established population of honey bees originally imported by rail from European Russia

These errors occur on page 3. Little incentive to proceed ...

plb

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html