My home city of Vancouver has a science museum with a glass walled observation hive that invariably draws a crowd transfixed by the daily tasks being performed inside the nest. Some observe with a studious demeanor, perhaps watching the queen laying an egg or following worker bees performing dances that communicate the location of flowers in nearby gardens. Others are simply transfixed and absorbed by the entire tableau; they appear to be meditating.

For those who pause to listen to their message, bees offer profound insight into religious, philosophical, and practical realms. They speak to us at the junction of the tangible and the spiritual, combining the utilitarian, practical services of pollination and honey production with the empyreal sphere inhabited by these marvelous animals.

It’s not a great surprise to see three new books about bees. Bees have provided deep wells for writers and artists to draw from for millennia. Art and literature about bees began with primitive drawings on cave walls and continued through great philosophers and writers – including Aristotle, Huber, and Maeterlinck – and contemporary, environmentally aware authors who passionately bemoan our diminishing connections to gently managed farmland and wild nature.

These three books are similar in themes and details, to the point of telling many of the same stories. Each weaves together a tapestry of nature, gardens, and wildflowers with historical trivia, beekeeping lore, profiles of eccentric beekeepers, odes to the power and beauty of honey and beeswax, and even recipes. Yet not all are equally successful.

The best of the batch is “Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee” by Hattie Ellis (Harmony Books, 288 pages, $23). It begins badly – very badly – with a photograph on the front and back covers of what’s supposed to be a bee, but is actually a fly that mimics a bee. This entomological offense aside, Ms. Ellis has written an evocative work that feels, smells, and tastes like everything to do with bees. Readers will be absorbed into the bee yard with her as she explores images and sensations of beekeeping with all senses alert.

Ms. Ellis is a journalist, and it shows. She turns phrases well, capturing both the eccentric nature of beekeepers and the natural rhythms by which they follow their calling. I was particularly taken with her ability to connect bees to the environment around them – Scottish moors where some of her book is set. Her short profile of beekeeper Willie Robson is nuanced and poignant, depicting a relationship among beekeeper, honeybee, and nature that is well balanced and tuned to seasonal rhythms.

Ms. Ellis seamlessly braids Mr. Robson’s story and her own passion for bees with larger issues: the future of the Scottish countryside and the rampaging pressure to turn wild country into managed cropland growing canola rather than its natural heather. Her book wanders through many side roads, at times telling us how bees have affected architects, at others bringing in the last poems of Sylvia Plath or the art of Canadian Aganetha Dyck, who uses bees as her collaborators.

In “Sweetness and Light,” bees in myth and history vie with Parisian shops that sell hundreds of honey varieties, and the methods of highly mobile commercial beekeepers are compared to honey-hunters from around the globe, who harvest from wild trees. Profiles abound of the quirky characters who inhabit apiculture: the Upper West Side lawyer who keeps bees on her roof, the New Zealand scientist obsessed with the medicinal qualities of manuka honey, the British monk who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at the age of 89 in search of a rare, pure strain of high-mountain honeybee.

Holley Bishop also is a journalist, one so deeply smitten by her own beekeeping hobby that she was inspired to write “Robbing the Bees” (Free Press, 308 pages, $24). She follows a Florida beekeeper, Donald Smiley, interspersing tales of honey, bee lore, history, and trivia with snapshots of Mr. Smiley’s year-round management and his quaint truisms about the great truths revealed by the insects in his care.

Ms. Bishop is less successful than Ms. Ellis, partly because the religious intensity of a transformative moment clouds her writing. By page two we learn that a friend gave her a plastic bear full of his honey that she dribbled into her mouth while in his bee yard, followed by a paragraph or so of cliches as “glistening,” “magical,” “golden green moment,” and “liquid fruits.” It ends with her hooked forever on beekeeping, leaving the reader a bit nauseous from the over-sweet language.

Ms. Bishop tells many of the same tales and trivia about bees, honey, and history that are in Ms. Ellis’s book, but her writing is more pedestrian. And while Bishop’s commercial beekeeping guide Donald Smiley is as colorful as any beekeeper, we learn more about his life and country sagacity than strictly necessary. Do we need to know, for example, that he loves honey so much that he doesn’t even own a sugar bowl?

The final book was the most disappointing, perhaps because it had the greatest potential. “Letters From the Hive” (Bantam, 272 pages, $24) was written by scientist and wild bee advocate Stephen Buchmann, with help from Banning Repplier – and that seems to be the problem. I’m always wary of books written “with” someone – why does an author need help from a behind-the-scenes fixer? “Letters” has a self-conscious feel; it reads as if the scientist’s editors worked too hard to simplify and diminish the text for a public audience. Stilted and self-conscious phrasings detract from what could have been a great story.

Mr. Buchmann is known for his crusade to save bee pollinators from the pesticides and habitat destruction that are diminishing their populations. There’s a great tale here, but “Letters” misses it. Instead, chapters meander aimlessly, dribbling to an end with recipes for cooking with honey and making mead rather than an inspired call-toarms to protect the environments in which wild and managed bees thrive.

Bees have connected humans with nature throughout our history, perhaps more than any other creature on earth. Much will be lost if we fail to recognize and preserve this bridge to the environment around us. These three books are a timely reminder.

Mr. Winston is an entomologist at Simon Fraser University and author, most recently, of “Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone” (Harvard University Press).