Revery: A Year of Bees | 
pickThoughtful essays by a woman of colour take readers through a year of beekeeping on her off-grid farm on the edge of the boreal forest in Alberta. Honeybees and wild bees, long winters and short summers, disastrous climate change events and personal trauma. Interconnectivity, gratitude, and an openness to learning are the key principles in this lovely, poetic collection. #naturewriting #CanadianAuthor
A hand rubbed along the bark of a trembling aspen comes away powdered with wild yeast, a substance that will both help to leaven our bread and function, in a pinch, as a workday‘s emergency sunscreen.
The bees are foraging widely from the hives, and there must be a particularly attractive fresh stand of willow nearby: the air just a few feet above our heads crackles with small furred darts coming and going. It‘s an insect superhighway up there; they don‘t call it a “beeline” for nothing.
Alberta alone is home to at least 320 confirmed species of wild bees, and approximately 30 of those are bumblebees, the improbable fuzz-bottomed blimps that seem to belong intimately to warm summer days in the north.
