Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change.
Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood – the set of people near and surrounding the family – through an examination of work bees in southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The bee was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour’s farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families’ daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, and their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation.
Beautifully written, engaging, and richly detailed and illustrated, Being Neighbours reveals the visceral textures of rural life.

Catharine Anne Wilson is professor of history, University of Guelph, and the author of the award-winning works A New Lease on Life and Reciprocal Work Bees and the Meaning of Neighbourhood.

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“[Being Neighbours] explores bees’ economic and social significance, ground rules and aberrations, moral and technological dimensions. It skillfully situates the story within broader literature on rural order, dispute resolution and cooperative labour. Engaging writing and plentiful photographs add to the appeal of this groundbreaking Work.” Champlain Society Floyd S. Chalmers Award jury

"This very welcome and richly exampled book provides a vivid and thought-provoking account of the life of ‘bees’ –moments of co-operative labour – on the farms of southern Ontario from the mid nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century." Family & Community History

“Catharine Wilson renders visible the social bonds of neighbouring and the complexity of rural life. Her in-depth examination allows a greater understanding of the inherent tensions in these work arrangements and the neighbourhoods that sustained them, dismantling some of the romantic glow of rural culture in a ‘simpler time.’ One of the most important works on rural culture in many years.” Joe Anderson, Mount Royal University and author of Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America

“This deeply researched and well-documented book skillfully reflects on rural farm life and the concept of a neighborhood. Wilson’s expertise is evident as she maintains a connection to the individual people within the network even as she examines the larger context of cooperative work, rural life, and neighborhood. …[T]hough the diaries used are specific to rural Ontario, the themes, struggles, and successes postulated by Wilson will resonate with readers across North America interested in historical rural culture. This is a great read for those interested in cooperative work, rural life, and the concept of neighborhoods.” H-Net Reviews