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From the stirrings of spring and summer swarms to autumn honey harvest and winter protection, this essential resource guides both the aspiring and experienced beekeeper through every season of the beekeeping year. Learn how to rear a queen, control a swarm, protect a hive, and keep bees healthy. The book is also packed with practical tips on using beeswax and, of course, making honey.

About the author: Ron Brown has more than 50 years' experience of keeping bees, both in Britain and central Africa. A former editor of the monthly journal Beekeeping, he has travelled all over the world to give lectures on specialist beekeeping topics.

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Richard Louv changed how we view and interact with nature in the New York Times best-seller Last Child in the Woods, which sparked an international movement to reconnect children with nature and introduced the term “nature-deficit disorder.” His new book The Nature Principle is a call to action for the rest of us to also reconnect with the natural world.

Does your daily nature intake include running on the treadmill with a forest scene on the TV monitor in front of you? Or perhaps playing Wii tennis with your kids — instead of playing on a real tennis court? We all — kids and adults alike — are suffering from “nature-deficit disorder.”

In The Nature Principle, Louv discusses how we can create a healthier balance between technology and nature, so that we can experience the best of technology and nature in our lives. He shows us how tapping into the restorative powers of the natural world can boost mental acuity and creativity; promote health and wellness; build smarter and more sustainable businesses, communities and economies; and ultimately strengthen human bonds. As he says in his introduction, The Nature Principle is “about the power of living in nature — not with it, but in it. We are entering the most creative period in history. The twenty-first century will be the century of human restoration in the natural world.”

Cities, communities, and organizations around the country are embracing this movement. In fact, May 6 has officially been declared the Richard Louv and Children and Nature Day in the city of San Diego! Louv is giving a call to action to change the way we live, and how much better off we’ll be for it.

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A quiet revolution is taking place: People across the United States are turning toward local food. Some are doing it because they want more nutritious, less-processed food; some want to preserve the farmland and rural character of their regions; some fear interruptions to the supply of non-local food; some want to support their local economy; and some want safer food with less threat of contamination. But this revolution comes with challenges.

Reclaiming Our Food tells the stories of people across America who are finding new ways to grow, process, and distribute food for their own communities. Their successes offer both inspiration and practical advice.

The projects described in this book are cropping up everywhere, from urban lots to rural communities and everywhere in between. In Portland, Oregon, an organization called Growing Gardens installs home gardens for low-income families and hosts follow-up workshops for the owners. Lynchburg Grows, in Lynchburg, Virginia, bought an abandoned 6.5-acre urban greenhouse business and turned it into an organic farm that offers jobs to people with disabilities and sells its food through a local farmers' market and a CSA. Sunburst Trout Farm, a small family business in rural North Carolina, is showing that it’s possible to raise fish sustainably and sell to a local market. And in Asheville, North Carolina, Growing Minds is finding ways to help bring fresh foods into schools. Author Tanya Denckla Cobb offers behind-the-scenes profiles of more than 50 food projects across the United States, with lessons and advice straight from their founders and staff. Photographic essays of 11 community food projects, by acclaimed photographer Jason Houston, detail the unusual work of these projects, bringing it to life in unforgettable images.

Reclaiming Our Food is a practical guide for building a local food system. Where others have made the case for the local food movement, Reclaiming Our Food shows how communities are actually making it happen. This book offers a wealth of information on how to make local food a practical and affordable part of everyone's daily fare.

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A compregensive introduction to the "nectar of the gods."

With increasing numbers of people ditching drugs for natural healing, Honey: Nature's Golden Healer is a timely look at how the beehive can help us look and feel better. Highlighted with hundreds of vivid color photographs, the book explains how honey is made and describes the complex lives of honeybees, beehive architecture and the sophisticated social structure of beehives. Novice beekeepers will find enough reliable information to get started on a small scale.

Honey examines the beneficial properties of honey and other bee products, such as propolis, pollen, royal jelly and beeswax, and explains how to collect and use them. The book includes recipes for homemade remedies, luxurious beauty formulas and delicious treats.

• The critical role of honeybees in agriculture
• The many types and colors of honey
• Raw Honey
• How honey compare to sugar
• Preserving with honey
• Honey's antibacterial properties and how they work
• Honey as a neutraceutical (a foodstuff with medicinal properties)
• Bee sting therapy
• Super-honeys
• The benefits of propolis, bee pollen and royal jelly
• Honey in cooking and baking

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Simple in its format, yet packed with information of many, many ways to prevent deer damage to your commercial crops or home garden. Explains how to use fencing and other barriers and visual and scent repellents. Also lists plants deer like and those they don’t like. Practical information from a true innovator who lives in deer country.

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In EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé — a giant in the environmental movement — confronts accepted wisdom of environmentalism. Drawing on the latest research from anthropology to neuroscience and her own field experience, she argues that the biggest challenge to human survival isn’t our fossil fuel dependency, melting glaciers or other calamities. Rather, it’s our faulty way of thinking about these environmental crises that robs us of power. Lappé dismantles seven common “thought traps”— from limits to growth to the failings of democracy — that belie what we now know about nature, including our own, and offers contrasting “thought leaps” that reveal our hidden power. Like her Diet for a Small Planet classic, EcoMind is challenging, controversial and empowering.

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Disasters often strike without warning and leave a trail of destruction in their wake. Yet armed with the right tools and information, survivors can fend for themselves and get through even the toughest circumstances. Matthew Stein's When Disaster Strikes provides a thorough, practical guide for how to prepare for and react in many of life's most unpredictable scenarios.

In this disaster-preparedness manual, he outlines the materials you'll need—from food and water, to shelter and energy, to first-aid and survival skills—to help you safely live through the worst. When Disaster Strikes covers how to find and store food, water, and clothing, as well as the basics of installing back-up power and lights. You’ll learn how to gather and sterilize water, build a fire, treat injuries in an emergency, and use alternative medical sources when conventional ones are unavailable.

Stein instructs you on the smartest responses to natural disasters—such as fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods—how to keep warm during winter storms, even how to protect yourself from attack or other dangerous situations. With this comprehensive guide in hand, you can be sure to respond quickly, correctly, and confidently when a crisis threatens.

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When lawyer Nigel Winter takes a few days off to follow in the tyre-tracks of one of England's greatest engineers, re-creating a ride from half a century ago that will take him from Land's End in southern England to John O'Groats in northern Scotland, he finds far, far more than he expects. For Mr Turner designed the motorcycle that powered Marlon Brando to fame in The Wild One and also the Triumph Bonneville, so beloved of '60s tearaways.

Travelling with Mr Turner throws wide open a portal into another world. As the author travels north you begin to feel the ghost of Turner, and his larger-than-life personality, peering out of the pages. Behind him looking on are the multitude of ordinary working people from the 1950s and 1960s, their fears and hopes, and the weird and wonderful class prejudices and management styles of the day.

And as they ride toward John O'Groats, the author on his modern Triumph and Turner on his Triumph Terrier in 1953, we encounter the bizarre history of Triumph Motorcycles. Record-breaking machines that sold around the world, and whose entire work force locked out the management just so that they could continue to make motorcycles and prevent Triumph from being consigned to history. A history so completely off the wall that it simply has to be true. Travelling with Mr Turner draws the reader in to experience how life was lived in those post-war decades of tumultuous change and rock 'n' roll and how the legend of Triumph encapsulates an entire generation in a world now nearly vanished into history, but still somehow wonderfully alive today. Witty, satirical and a truly riveting read, one that leaves the reader just begging for more!

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Author Ellen Sandbeck preaches a return to a more primitive way of life—a life with more joy and fewer household products. Green Barbarians demonstrates that by mustering a bit of courage and relying less on many modern conveniences, we can live happier, safer, more ecologically and economically responsible lives.

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Fresh-from-the-chicken eggs are increasingly available everywhere, offering great nutrition and unbeatable flavor. Whether you’re collecting your eggs from a backyard coop or buying them at farmers’ markets and local farms, Jennifer Trainer Thompson has 101 delicious recipes to help you make the most of them. She includes a wealth of breakfast favorites with new twists, from the perfect soft-boiled egg to French toast, omelets, eggs Florentine, and huevos rancheros. Fresh eggs shine in classic dishes such as Caesar salad, spaghetti carbonara, eggnog, deviled eggs, and homemade mayonnaise. And you’ll love Thompson’s creative recipes for every meal of the day, from smoothies and appetizers to casseroles and stews.