M.E.A. McNeil with Dr. Marla Spivak - Bee Club: A Novel (Dominican University of California)

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M.E.A. McNeil

In conversation with Dr. Marla Spivak

Bee Club

A Novel

SOLD OUT/ WAITLIST OPEN • Ticketed

Wed., Feb. 26th, 2025 • 6:00pm

Creekside Lounge - Dominican University of California

   SOLD OUT / REGISTRATION CLOSED   CLICK HERE TO JOIN WAITLIST   SUBSCRIBE TO OUR E-NEWSLETTER SUPPORT OUR EVENTS PROGRAM 

This event will be hosted by Dominican University of California located at their Creekside Lounge (adjacent to Caleruega Dining Hall). Please contact books@bookpassage.com with questions regarding online events.

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Join us in welcoming Journalist and Master Beekeeper M.E.A. McNeil for a moderated conversation with Dr. Marla Spivak in celebration of her compelling new novel BEE CLUB.

Presented in partnership with Institute for Leadership Studies (ILS) and the Women, Leadership and Philanthropy Council

• Copies of BEE CLUB will be available for purchase at the event.

"Witty, heartwarming, and true-to-life" – Eugene Makovec, Editor, The American Bee Journal



Held together as step-kin to a bunch of insects, the club confronts the obstacles that are causing the loss of bees everywhere. Members include some who keep bees for their livelihood, some for their spirit, some for a few bucks and adventure, and some for the science–but most for fascination with creatures that communicate by dance and scent, and can even reverse age. Then there is Lilja, an anxious, bee-phobic teenager with nowhere else to go.

Navigating pests, pathogens, and poor forage, the members are also faced with their own irreconcilable ideologies. Whatever the opinions of those who tend their boxes, the bees are undomesticated, independent. They mingle their genes and their problems; among them thrives the lineage of a queen bee with a genetic advantage. Bee Club is as much about the bees as their hovering people.

M.E.A. McNeil is a journalist and Master Beekeeper living in a strawbale house on a small Northern California organic farm with her husband and son. She is of Finnish extraction, and one of her books of Finnish mythology was awarded the Aesop Accolade. Her queries into the world of beekeeping for non-fiction articles over two decades has provided a depth of education that frames her current novel, Bee Club.

Dr. Marla Spivak is a MacArthur Fellow and Distinguished McKnight University Professor in Entomology at the University of Minnesota. Her innovative research has influenced beekeeping and is a theme in the novel Bee Club.

"The characters are complex, the vivid descriptions engage your senses, and the story compels you to keep reading." – Sarah Pollock, Writer and longtime senior editor, Mother Jones, Professor Emerita, Mills College

"M.E.A. McNeil takes us on Lilja's journey into the world of bees and beekeepers where we experience truth telling, within Finnish saunas, just-like-real-life bickering among beekeepers, and biologically sound deceptions of bees' magical ways. We learn it is not just Lilja's journey; it is also all of ours." – Marla Spivak, Professor of Entomology, University of Minnesota, MacArthur Fellow

"M.E.A. McNeil expertly weaves the inner dramas happening inside a beehive with the human dramas outside..." – Meredith May, Author of The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage, and a Girl Saved By Bees 

M.E.A. McNeil photo courtesy of the author. Dr. Marla Spivak photo courtesy of the author.