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Held together as step-kin to a bunch of insects, the club confronts the obstacles that are causing the loss of bees everywhere. Members include some who keep bees for their livelihood, some for their spirit, some for a few bucks and adventure, and some for the science–but most for fascination with creatures that communicate by dance and scent, and can even reverse age. Then there is Lilja, an anxious, bee-phobic teenager with nowhere else to go.

Navigating pests, pathogens, and poor forage, the members are also faced with their own irreconcilable ideologies. Whatever the opinions of those who tend their boxes, the bees are undomesticated, independent. They mingle their genes and their problems; among them thrives the lineage of a queen bee with a genetic advantage. Bee Club is as much about the bees as their hovering people.

M.E.A. McNeil is a journalist and Master Beekeeper living in a straw bale house on a small Northern California organic farm with her husband and son. She is of Finnish extraction, and one of her books of Finnish mythology was awarded the Aesop Accolade. Her queries into the world of beekeeping for non-fiction articles over two decades has provided a depth of education that frames her current novel, Bee Club.

Dr. Marla Spivak is a MacArthur Fellow and Distinguished McKnight University Professor in Entomology at the University of Minnesota. Her innovative research has influenced beekeeping and is a theme in the novel Bee Club.