M.E.A. (“Mea”) McNeil has been tantalized by the lives of bees ever since she tended her first hives on her San Anselmo organic farm 40 years ago.

“Those days, we put the bees in a box that we opened every once in a while to extract honey,” she said.

The arrival of Asian mites changed that, though.

“Our European honeybees did not evolve (with the mites), and it became necessary to husband the bees, so I set about educating myself, eventually going through a master beekeeper program.”

Thus began a journey into the bee world for McNeil, an illustrator and the author of “A Mother’s Story,” “The Magic Storysinger,” “The First Year” and “Vintners Club,” as well as a collection of bee-related articles in the American Bee Journal.

While she was in the master of fine arts program in creative writing at Mills College at Northeastern University, she was required to write fiction to hone her “nonfiction chops.”

The happy result is the release this month of her new book, “Bee Club” (Nervous Ghost Press, $13.95).

To celebrate, McNeil will join Marla Spivak onstage at Dominican University of California on Feb. 26 for “About the Bees: A Conversation,” a talk presented by Book Passage, Dominican’s Institute for Leadership Studies and the Women Leadership and Philanthropy Council.

McNeil said that the research done by Spivak, a MacArthur fellow and Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Entomology at the University of Minnesota, “has had a seismic impact on the way we keep bees by showing that some bees have a genetic ability to sniff out pests and pathogens,” a topic which she explores in the novel.

McNeil’s novel begins when Etta, a Finnish American, lets her grandniece, Lilja, stay with her in her cozy straw bale farmhouse in rural Northern California, complete with breakfasts of homemade bread laden with various honeys, simple suppers, steamy saunas, old farm trucks, cold showers and no cell reception.Over the summer, neighbors and others who rely on — or are interested in — the bee world wander in and out of their lives.

For example, there’s the part-time teenage intern who’s deathly afraid of bees; Lilja’s cruel and irresponsible cousin; a woman who comes to Etta for secretive bee stings for her apitherapy; and a politician’s clueless wife who wants to spray bee killer on a misguided swarm.

McNeil drew upon her 20 years of inquiry into the bee world — and the many beekeeper clubs she attended — to create her cast of characters, but she insists that their situations, tensions and joy are real. (Marin County Beekeepers held meetings in McNeil’s barn before the membership outgrew the space.)

Bee clubs consist of “people brought together by their fascination for bees and often enough little else,” she said. “It’s fair to say that beekeepers tend to be independent souls with strong opinions, as those in the book demonstrate.”

Through the novel’s characters, readers are introduced to “raucous club meetings, county fair contests, a bee beard show, a pathogen-sniffing dog, a bee truck spill, the annual Bee Ball and an event that brings an unexpected resolution,” according to a press release.

“Novelists are such rag-pickers,” McNeil said. “The characters are mostly amalgams of various attributes I’ve come across.”

Two, though, are modeled after real people: the UC Davis Extension apiarist is the woman currently in that job, and Raz, the man who came through a beekeeping program for vets with PTSD.

“He told me that the way it works is that a soldier is trained to face danger with aggression, but a beekeeper learns to face thousands of stinging insects with calm,” she said.

Through the thoughts and conversations of her characters, McNeil, of Finnish extraction herself, gently weaves through the story Finnish wisdom and lore, bee behaviors, bee husbandry and hive-keeping techniques, queen bee breeding practices, the qualities of honey and the real-life challenges that face our honeybees, along with the ongoing search for solutions.

In this easy-to-read story form, readers learn about the complicated bee world in easy-to-digest pieces.

McNeil likens it to “zucchini bread as a way to eat your vegetables, but more than that, the fictional story is a way to embrace the passionate complexity of the beekeeping world.”

“Bee Club” allows us all to “learn a lot about bees, their independent behavior and the deep relationship that humans have had with them for millennia,” she said.

• Details: “About the Bees: A Conversation” is at 6 p.m. Feb. 26 at the Creekside Room at Dominican University of California at 100 Magnolia Ave. in San Rafael. Admission is $30 in advance online or at door. A ticket includes a copy of the book. Get tickets at bookpassage.com.

Show off

If you have a beautiful or interesting Marin garden or a newly designed Marin home, I’d love to know about it.

Please send an email describing either one (or both), what you love most about it and a photograph or two. I will post the best ones in upcoming columns. Your name will be published, and you must be over 18 years old and a Marin resident.

Don’t-miss event

• The Marin Rose Society will present Jolene Adams and “Soil is not Dirt” at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Marin Art and Garden Center at 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd. in Ross. Admission is free. Go to marinrose.org.

PJ Bremier writes on home, garden, design and entertaining topics every Saturday. She may be contacted at P.O. Box 412, Kentfield 94914, or at pj@pjbremier.com.