Dave Goulson is a professorial bee man (at the University of Sussex, he is the queen of the Goulson Lab) but he is also very good at writing accessibly about his study systems. His book about bumblebees, A Sting in the Tale (2013), is among the brightest things in the recent flowering of composite works of nature writing, natural history and memoir.
The material gathered in A Buzz in the Meadow draws on the first book and richly (and darkly) extends it. It is really a series of essays on, first, the lives of some insects Goulson has known; second, the interrelationships of plants and some of their insect pollinators; and last, three polemics on the coming end of the world, as it seems to Goulson, including most blackly, the urgent news of his own work on neonicotinoids, the insecticides that are killing the worlds bees as well as much too much else.
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