Having already won the Canadian Science Writers 2014 Book of the Year Award for Bee Time: Lessons From the Hive, Mark Winston won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in 2015 for Bee Time (Harvard University Press 2014), an overview that gathers his observations and opinions about bees drawn from his three decades of study, including his advice as to how humans should modify their behavior with the natural world in general, and bees in particular. Specifically, Winston, who manages a website called The Hive, stresses how "honeybees represent a pinnacle of animal sociality."

Coincidentally Mark Winston was profiled as one of British Columbia's Most Influential Scientists by The Province newspaper in July, 2015. "Honeybees are hurting," Winston wrote in The Scotsman in December of 2014, "with one-third of all colonies dying annually across most of the world. Beekeepers can barely maintain hive numbers in their apiaries, splitting their hives each year to make up for losses and then doing it again the next year, and the next... We can save the bees by reducing pesticide use and improving the habitats they forage in. By collaborating in their survival we might learn some valuable lessons about our own."

According to publicity materials, Winston explains in Bee Time how bees process information, structure work, and communicate, and examines how corporate boardrooms are using bee societies as a model to improve collaboration. He investigates how bees have altered our understanding of agricultural ecosystems and how urban planners are looking to bees in designing more nature-friendly cities.

At a time when bee populations are diminishing, particularly due to the widespread use of pesticides, Winston's GG-winner is one of three new books from B.C. authors about books. The others are beekeeper Merrie-Ellen Wilcox's What's the Buzz: Keeping Bees in Flight (Orca 2015) and The Summer We Saved the Bees by Robin Stevenson. The latter young adult novel was featured on the cover of BC BookWorld's Autumn 2015 issue.

As an SFU biologist, Mark Winston drew upon his field work in South America to put the behaviour of 'Africanized bees' into perspective for Killer Bees: The Africanized Honey Bee in the Americas. His previous book, also from Harvard University Press, was The Biology of the Honey Bee. Winston also published Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone: Room for Respectful Conversation, about the face-off between natural food activists and the high-tech companies who grow tomatoes in research labs. Winston searches for the middle ground in the increasingly contentious debate about genetically modified foods.

Mark Winston was born in Brooklyn, New York and came to B.C. in 1980. He received the 2001 Academic of the Year Award from the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia.

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Listening to the Bees by Mark L. Winston & Renée Sarojini Saklikar
(Nightwood Editions $22.95)

Revew by Mary Ann Moore

Mark l. winston, one of the world's leading experts on bees and pollination, writes in one of his essays:
"Science with its reliance on data and objectivity, may seem the least poetic of professions, but scientists and poets have at least one thing in common: we share a love of words and exploration.";

Winston's extensive research includes graduate studies at the University of Kansas where he analyzed the mouthparts ("labiomaxillary complex";) of long-tongued bees.

Now Winston and Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Poet Laureate for the City of Surrey, have created a "call-and-response rhythm,"; mixing Winston's essays with Saklikar's poems, for Listening to the Bees.
And, yes, they have included a poem entitled "Labiomaxillary.";

In french guiana on the north-east coast of South America, Winston observed stingless bees. In recent years, he has become an informal advisor to Hives for Humanity (H4H) in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
For twenty years, beginning in 1980, an abandoned building at the edge of SFU downtown became the Bee House where Winston and his researcher students were the Swarm Team.

He continues to learn how bees provide a model for how to be in the world: "collaborative and communicative, listening deeply to others, being present in the moment.";

Renée Sarojini Saklikar is a mentor and instructor for SFU's writing and publishing program who spent time with Winston's original research documents. She writes:
"My poetics lean to language as material, and the quest is to marry song, chants, spells and incantations with syntactical wordplay, embroidering the poems I make with numeric patterns, such as my obsession with both hexagons and anything to do with the number six, and the ten-syllable line, whose movement sometimes leads to form poetic structures...";
In each form, she allows "lyricism to exist within and alongside the language of science"; with less description and more sound.

"Scientific language,"; says Winston, "becomes poetry for me through the sheer joy of jargon's sound and rhythm.";

For instance, one of the terms that "evokes personal resonance"; is "hibernalcum, a place of abode in which a creature seeks refuge.";
There are photos and illustrations throughout the book as well as an appendix of terms related to Winston's published research papers.
Alongside Saklikar's poem "Hibernacula"; is a photograph of the poet sitting on the back of a garden bench surrounded by blooms and structures in the form of large-winged bees.

Saklikar titles a poem "a moishe (To Mark)"; which ends: "into the bee yard / you brought me-and so we whispered / let the song reside in us forever.";
Mark L. Winston says of collaborating with Saklikar, "her poetry has deepened my own thinking about the science I've done over the last forty-five years."; 978-0-88971-346-8

Mary Ann Moore is a poet, and writing mentor in Nanaimo. Her last book was Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press) She blogs at apoetsnanaimo.ca
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BOOKS:

The Biology of the Honey Bee (Harvard, 1987)
Killer Bees: The Africanized Honey Bee in the Americas (Harvard, 1992)
Nature Wars: People vs. Pests (Harvard, 1997)
From Where I Sit: Essays on Bees, Beekeeping and Science (Cornell, 1998)
Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone (Harvard, 2002)
Chemical Communication in Social Insects (Westview, 1998)
Bee Time (Harvard University Press 2014) $24.95 9780674368392

[BCBW 2015] "Science"