April General Meeting: 

April 14, 2025 6:00 - 8:30 pm

Druid Hall: 1011 College Ave.  Santa Rosa

Guest Speaker: Mea McNeil

Mea McNeil is a journalist and Master Beekeeper and will be sharing with us the "Facts behind the Fiction" of her book "Bee Club" 

In Bee Club, McNeil tells the story of a disparate group attracted to the importance and intrigue of a bunch of insects. They find themselves bound together like kin to these undomesticated creatures – from the curious hobbyists to the entomologists delving into the mysteries of Apis down to the veins in their wings. Some keep bees to eke out a livelihood, like an elderly Finnish woman; some to heal, like the vet from a VA beekeeping program to treat PTSD; some for the spirit, like the woman who extols the beneficial vibrations of a buzzing colony; some for adventure and a few bucks, like the trio of friends that cram into a vintage Airstream to count frames of migratory bees for almond pollination. And then there is the bee-phobic teenager, with nowhere else to go.

                There, in the Northern California countryside, the club is a microcosm of the joys and anguish of the wider beekeeping world. The beekeepers confront the reality of a continuing loss of bees. They face pests, pathogens and poor forage – and their own irreconcilable convictions. Whatever the opinions of those who tend their boxes, the bees are independent; they mingle their genes and their problems. The narrative follows, at bee’s-eye level, the lineage of one queen bee with a genetic advantage.
                Here is an engrossing, witty and accurately-detailed story, as much about bees as their hovering people.

M.E.A. McNeil (called Mea) is a journalist, MFA and Master Beekeeper living in a strawbale house on a small Northern California organic farm. She is of Finnish extraction, as is a character in the book, and one of her books of Finnish mythology was awarded the Aesop Accolade. Her over 100 long-form non-fiction articles delving into the bee world over two decades have provided a depth of education that frames her current novel, Bee Club.