Books for dads and father figures

With Father's Day on 15 June, ditch the socks and treat the special man in your life to one (or more!) of the reads on Patricia McCracken's list this week - from nature and sport to biography and fiction.

- Patricia McCracken

5 KEY WORDS:

CONNAL D EARDLEY

You need a lot more than honeybees for better pollination and crops, says Connal D Eardley, whose identification guide, Big Bees of South Africa (R165) has been published by the South African National Biodiversity Institute in its Suricata series.

“People know the honeybee and why it should be conserved,” he says, “but knowledge of other bees is generally poor – and you can’t conserve what you don’t know. We need identification guides for bees like we have for plants and birds.”

Eardley grew up with a love of the veld, and his first thought was to go into conservation, but fate and logistics conspired against him. He moved into entomology and discovered taxonomy and decoding the family links between bee species.

Here are his five guiding key words:

1. Explore. I spent my childhood in the veld and kept any sort of animal I could get my hands on.

2. Size. The bigger bees are more exciting than the small ones. I began with carpenter bees because entomologist Richard Watmough worked on them and needed someone to sort out their taxonomy.

3. Attracted. You can enjoy watching bees and having them in your garden. Some nest in burrows in the soil or logs of wood. Others make nests of cottony fibre, resin, or mud. Some parasitise other bees, so we call them ‘cuckoo bees’.

4. Count. If there are fewer than 100 species of bee on a farm, the bee fauna is probably quite limited.