To Bee or not to Bee
Beekeeper Susan Cormier tells tales of life on the edge of nature and the precarious world of the honey bee as urban life encroaches upon her Langley farm.
June 10th, 2026
Susan Cormier is a spoken word artist, event producer, beekeeper and caretaker of small critters.
Edgy is a word that’s been blunted by overuse to describe art, music or writing that’s gratuitously bizarre; superficial stunts merely meant to startle or shock. In these “tales of life at the edge of nature,” Susan Cormier invokes the original, deeper meaning. Edges are the borders, disputed “no-man’s-lands” where continents and cultures, economic and ecological zones, ideologies and philosophies rub against each other, exposing their fault lines and danger zones.
Review by John Moore
Dead Bees Still Sting: Tales of Life at the Edge of Nature by Susan Cormier (Greystone $26.95) isn’t a polemic or an academic lecture. We get enough of both on social media and all they produce is comfortably-numb moral paralytics staring at digital wallpaper. Instead, Cormier does what the best writers always do: she uses all the powers of language to trip the circuit breakers and light up the dusty synapses we used for critical and creative thinking before corporate “antisocial media” switched them off. From page one, it’s clear this isn’t garden variety nature writing either.
Susan Cormier on her Langley farm.
Cormier stretches language and imagination to their edges as she chronicles all aspects of life at a small homestead in Langley on the front line between expansionist urban concrete and the rural world. Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee, gets the title role because she’s the MVP (Most Valuable Pollinator) and an ecological bellwether. Like a canary in a coal mine, the humble hardworking honey bee is a harbinger of environmental stress. Cormier meticulously notes changes to the colour and flavour of her honey when a nearby woodland is bulldozed for a housing project.
Beekeepers like Cormier are the early-warning system, but even suburban gardeners get the “DEFCON 4” signal (a military term for a warning) when early-blooming heather is too quiet. A few years ago, beekeepers in Squamish, another rural community besieged by condo developers, experienced a bee colony collapse event. My neighbour and I discovered we each had a half-interest in a single honey bee. We spent that summer following her, arms outstretched to defend her from birds, knocking away spider webs as she struggled to service both gardens. Despite her valiant efforts and our vigilance it was a dismal year for fruit and vegetables. We felt the sting of all those dead bees.
Cormier’s method is the literary equivalent of the Slow Food movement. Like the deliberately calm slow motions of beekeeping, Dead Bees Still Sting is meant to be read one episode at a time; enjoyed and fully digested before progressing to the next. It’s divided into seasonally themed sections and each presents a deftly balanced mix of memoir, anecdote, personal essay and poetry that echoes Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.
Spoken word artist Susan Cormier at a Story Slam in Vancouver.
For example, Part 1: Spring, leads with “Advice to a New Beekeeper,” which won a CBC Literary Award for Nonfiction. Barely disguised as an essay, it addresses the reader directly in calculated, cadenced sentences whose hypnotic effect is oratorical rather than literal. Switch off your usual “silent reading” mode and read aloud to yourself (or a willing partner) to get the full effect. That’s why, despite being a first book, Dead Bees Still Sting isn’t really a startling outlier from an untried author.
Susan Cormier honed her skills as a spoken word artist. She continues to produce Vancouver Story Slam, Canada’s longest-running live independent storytelling competition. Spoken word artists are more than writers. They’re a hybrid of writer and actor descended from Celtic bards and the wandering poets of preclassical Greece. Anyone who has paid to watch authors like Margaret Atwood or David Adams Richards read from their works knows that, in person, the Reclusive Author can be as disappointing as first-date sex with someone you met on the Internet. In contrast, the first time I saw Ivan Coyote tell stories I’d read, rather than read from a book or notes, I nearly spilled my beer with admiration.
Dead Bees Still Sting is a finely crafted and deeply reflective work by a writer who has thoroughly road tested her stories by speaking them aloud to people, not just writing them down. This is a book you can take a year to read—not just a rainy afternoon—and find more in it as you re-read it again and again. May the force Bee with you. 9781778402012
John Moore writes reviews from Garibaldi Highlands. He owns a T-shirt illustrated by his daughter when she was ten that says, “This Dad Loves Bees.”
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