PositiveThe Wall Street JournalHanson examines our contemporary relationship with bees, visiting farmers who depend on bees for pollination. Beekeepers move thousands of colonies from crop to blooming crop throughout the year, helping pollinate one out of every three bites we eat, including the good stuff, like berries, cherries, melons, peaches, lettuce and almonds. Armed with tweezers and a hand lens, he performs a Michael Pollan-esque deconstruction of a McDonald’s Big Mac, removing the ingredients that require pollination. \'Certainly,\' he writes, \'the advertising slogan wouldn’t have been nearly as catchy: ‘Two all-beef patties, bun\'... Mr. Hanson is an insightful observer of evolution, at his most elegant when digging deep into the science, and at his clumsiest, ironically, when he tries to make that science more relevant to his readers: comparing bees that lay eggs in other bees’ nests to mooching college roommates, for instance; or noting that humans, like bees, are social creatures, even if certain humans \'do spend a lot of their time alone, sitting in shacks, writing books\'
