Book Review: What Grandpa Learned from the Honeybees

Title: What Grandpa Learned from the Honeybees 

Author: Henry J. Svec (and Mary J. Svec)

Date: 2023

Publisher: Amazon

ISBN: 978-1-989346-97-6

Quote: "Mary and I decided to turn our 50-acre farm back over to nature and create a honeybee sanctuary." 

With an opener like that and a picture of a bee on the cover, I was expecting a book about farming or beekeeping. Well, this isn't one. It's about money, and the Svecs don't claim they made theirs in beekeeping. They assume that the reader, too, has a steady job with a good income, and proceed to discuss the benefits of saving, frugality, and sensible investment strategies. 

Does that make this a book for the privileged? Older people won't think so. The Svecs have not forgotten the stage in life when saving meant walking instead of riding the bus to save two dollars a week (today it'd be more like two dollars a trip), and you could do that, because you were still full of energy, because your body was still growing. What may seem like an assumption of privilege, to the young, is that when we were young anybody could go out and find a steady low-paid, student-labor-type job, if only in food service. Today the young are competing for those jobs with 38-year-old single parents who know that, if they lose this part-time job as a busboy or pool cleaner, they'll lose custody of the children too. And those of us who aren't young, owe our youthful looks and energy to exercise, and would like to get paid for doing that exercise on a student-labor-type job, are lucky if prospective employers are polite enough not to laugh in our faces.

Anyway this book was written by a nice couple of grandparents, for their grandchildren first and the rest of the world afterward, and their grandchildren have jobs and can save a little money by bringing their refreshments for the work day from home instead of buying overpriced coffee and snacks in town, walking instead of riding the bus, and so on. Bee behavior offers analogies to that, and the Svecs go on to draw further analogies from bee behavior to Grandpa's rules for choosing investments, in real estate or in stocks and bonds. The Svecs live in Canada and focus on businesses and real estate in Canada, but their strategy is the sort of thing that could potentially work anywhere.

This book will not teach the reader how to keep bees, but it may offer some tips the reader can use, at least to stay off welfare in between one employer's going out of business and the next employer's being found. And it's a pleasant read, with something of the feel of listening to bees buzz in a prairie abloom with clover.