Busy Bee and the Silent Spring

Silent Spring is a follow up to Busy Bee and the Endangered Meadow. In that story, Bea (Beatrice) and the inhabitants of the meadow fought off some developers who wanted to build houses all over it. In this second story the bees and many of the other creatures are starting to feel ill during the spring of that year. Some bees mention that there is a strange smell in the air, different to the normal ones that arrive with the season. Even though everything looks normal in the meadow to the people walking through it, there is an eerie silence and with Doctor Bee recommending to some of the songbirds that they rest their voices it is not hard to understand why.The problem gets worse and some bees are found lost and confused and unable to fly so have to be rescued. Doctor Bee and her nurses become very busy treating the bumblebees, the solitary bees and many of the meadow's other inhabitants that aren't feeling well. On top of this all the pollinating of plants and making honey is falling behind. None of the bees can think of what the problem might be until the resourceful Bea remembers the smell and organises with the queen and Wise Old Bee a team to search for the source. The bees discover that it is coming from the farm to the west, beyond the trees separating it from the meadow. With some special masks made by the bee engineers Bea's team enter a dark barn to discover containers with the skull and cross bones on them plus some words they don't understand and are too long to remember. No problem, each bee will remember a few letters each.The bees organise a meeting of all the meadow's inhabitants that can get there but nobody knows the meaning of the words. A fly suggests going to the village library to find out as one of the windows is always left slightly open. So one moonlit night ten bats and three owls carry the bees, some fireflies, the fly, a mouse, a discarded lighter and a tiny beeswax candle to the library where the bees learn the meaning of the words on the containers. It is very bad news. Warned by the foxes howling Bea and her team hastily leave the library leaving the tiny beeswax candle as a mystery to be solved along with some blurry photographs of the creatures returning to the meadow taken by a couple returning from the pub. These find their way to a local reporter who tries to tie together some very strange clues as to who was in the library. They all seem to point to something happening in Old Oak Meadow which has always been a very special place.Meanwhile, back in the meadow, the inhabitants are preparing again to fight to save it. They will have to work together using all their skills and strengths. Will their plans thwart the evil farmer to the west? It will need the help of the organic farmer to the east of the meadow but how can they get him to help them?