15 Buzzy Novels About Bees

Book Summary

Grace is a fifty-something beekeeper facing two difficult battles. She’s thrown her husband out for cheating, but now he has a developer knocking on her door trying to sell her beautiful garden and home. She will do anything she can to save her sanctuary.

While she’s telling her friend all her problems at the flower farm next door, a visitor named Amos offers to help. He’ll turn her home into an income-generating guest house in exchange for beekeeping lessons. As they work together, Grace feels like she’d like Amos to stay in Hope’s Corner forever, but she also fears he’s hiding something from his past.

Book Summary

Olivia has been raising her son, Asher, as a single mom ever since she fled her seemingly perfect marriage that was not as it appeared from the outside. When she left her abusive marriage to protect her son, she brought him to her small hometown in New Hampshire. Once home, she moved into her childhood house and took over her father’s beekeeping business.

Like Olivia, Lily is also familiar with starting over. She and her mom recently relocated to New Hampshire to give Lily a fresh start in her final year of high school.

Olivia and Lily’s lives cross paths when Asher begins dating and falls in love with the new girl in town. A few months later, Olivia is shocked to receive a phone call from Asher that he’s at the police station and Lily is dead. Asher is the only suspect in the case, but he insists he didn’t do it. Olivia is willing to give up everything she has to defend her son. But as the case moves toward trial, and as she discovers that Asher has hidden more from her than she realized, Olivia begins to question what traits her son may have inherited from his father.

Book Summary

A middle school summer should involve pool parties and sleepovers, but instead twelve year old Carolina is in New Mexico with her parents. They are moving her grandfather, whom she hadn’t met before, into a home for seniors with dementia. He has a prickly personality, so Carol avoids him at first, but then she’s drawn into his crazy stories.

As he shares tales about a healing tree, a green-glass lake, and the bees that will bring back the rain to end a hundred years of drought, she finds herself in the blurred line between fantasy and reality.

Book Summary

Eliane tends to the bees at the beautiful Château Bellevue in France. It’s 1938, and her peaceful life is being threatened as France’s eastern border is getting closer to war. Eliane is separated from her first love, Mathieu, as their town is occupied by the Germans, and Eliane makes the brave choice to join the Resistance.

In the present day, Abi is also running from heartbreak as she takes a summer job in rural France at the Château Bellevue. The Château is deeply connected to the past and Abi is drawn to the incredible tale of one woman.

Book Summary

After her mother passes away, 14-year-old Lily Owens runs away with her friend and nanny, Rosaleen. The two escape to Tiburon, South Carolina, where an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters takes them in. 

Lily is introduced to the world of bees and honey, the Black Madonna, and the town that holds the secret to her mother’s past.

Book Summary

Georgia is an antique expert, specifically Limoges fine china. She enjoys studying the past of others while trying to forget her own. She left her coastal Florida home ten years ago, and never thought she’d return. 

When a job brings her back home, her grandfather’s apiary brings her unexpected peace. However, a run-in with her estranged mom and sister brings ghosts of the past back to the forefront of her life. 

Book Summary

What would the world look like if bees became extinct like other animals before them? This dystopian novel takes us to the near future and follows Sasha, the daughter of the Last Beekeeper. She was twelve when the bees went extinct and her father was arrested. Now, ten years later, food is scarce. She returns to her childhood home, where she believes her father left his research before being incarcerated.

Instead of finding her farm in the same quiet, idyllic state it was left a decade earlier, she finds that it has been taken over by squatters. While this is scary at first, she soon finds comfort in her found family. One day, Sasha is shocked to see a honey bee. Will this discovery save her new family of friends, or will it threaten their lives?

Book Summary

In the early 1930s, young Grace lived on a rural estate in Dorset, England. As the only child of a beekeeper, she spent a lot of time learning her dad’s trade. When her father suddenly died, she was left alone (outside of the man she loved but knew would never be hers).

In 1970s Massachusetts, Grace’s daughter Trixie is in love with the wild lead singer in a rock band. When he has to return to his home in England, he promises to return if she’ll wait for him.

Unaware of each other’s secrets, Grace and Trixie both search for lost loves and eventually must face the lies told long ago.

Book Summary

While we selected almost all novels for our book list about bees, we couldn’t pass up this non-fiction read that takes readers inside the mind of a bee. The author uses decades of research and personal experience working with bees to show that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others.

Book Summary

Beckett is a beekeeper alongside her father, but then his unexpected death causes more trauma than expected because of a clause in his trust. There is now a new part owner in her apiary, a woman she’s never even heard of. And this new owner wants to sell the land they have worked so hard to build. Why would her father do this to her?

Callie is shocked to be named in the trust of a man she’s never heard of. The timing is helpful because she has a new business, and her mother has reappeared in her life and wants money so she can finally enter rehab. If the property she inherited is sold, it will solve all her problems.

Book Summary

While Holly’s difficult mom is referred to as the “QB” (queen bee) around Sullivan’s Island, Holly is an actual beekeeper. While she originally stayed in town to take care of her mom, thirty-year-old Holly is ready to find her own husband, family, and maybe even a career as a teacher.

When Holly’s sister Leslie returns to town due to a complicated time in her marriage, the sisters have a chance to reconnect as adults.

Book Summary

This novel weaves the story of a beekeeper, Sidi, into a tale about the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Sidi is heartbroken when he wakes up one morning to find that his beloved bees have been attacked by a swarm of hornets. The killer hornets aren’t native to the area, and Sidi must figure out where they came from and how they can be stopped. 

His journey takes him out of his village and into the city, where he encounters those impacted by the Arab Spring, uprisings that took place between 2010-2011 in Tunisia (and spread to other nations).

Book Summary

Nuri and his wife, Afra, live in the beautiful city of Aleppo, Syria. They have a great life as a beekeeper and an artist, until war comes to their doorstep. Like so many others, Nuri and Afra are forced onto the Syrian refugee trail. They travel through Turkey and Greece, even though Afra has been blinded, making their journey even more harrowing. The couple slowly works their way toward a cousin in Britain who has already started a beekeeping course for fellow refugees. 

Book Summary

In 1918, the Mexican Revolution and Spanish Flu overlapped and presented increasing challenges to everyday life. When a family elder, Nana Reja, finds a baby covered in bees under a bridge, he is considered “kissed by the devil” by the locals. But Francisco and Beatriz Morales are willing to adopt him. As he gets older, it becomes clear that he really is different. In fact, when he closes his eyes, he can see things that no one else can – visions of the future.