Broke, with a bad knee, and no place to pasture a few cows, Bill Robeiro joins two struggling friends, Jim Delahunt and Hrubel Kwasnik, in a scheme to develop, produce, and sell TrunkWax, a tree-trunk paint that imparts wondrous properties to fruit trees and might put some needed dollars in their pockets besides being a boon to natural and organic orchardists. Bill travels to France to locate a source of microbe-rich, bovine manure, a key ingredient in their TrunkWax recipe. Along the way, he thwarts a hotel burglary in Clermont-Ferrand, collects a reward, plays professional rugby in the Cantal, cowboys in the Camargue, and rescues a kidnapped Welsh cattleman from Canadian separatists.

TrunkWax: Delahunt at Large begins in the small Northern California town of Pylewood, when Jim Delahunt finds himself trapped by his wife at the bottom of an empty ten-thousand-gallon pickle barrel. Employing tricks acquired from over fifty years of experience as a merchant seaman, machinist, and cattle rancher, he frees himself and hooks up with two disgruntled buddies: a cowboy with two bad knees and a tightly wound organic farmer. Together, they hatch a plot aimed at getting him revenge, earning money for a double knee replacement for the cowboy, and commercializing TrunkWax, a microbial concoction that the organic farmer believes will revolutionize fruit cultivation. When Delahunt's part of the plan takes him to China, he gets kidnapped in Inner Mongolia by a Manchurian ex-cop. He is subsequently rescued by a group of international polo players, flown back to the United States, and reunited with his wife. Over breakfast, they both realize his incarceration in the barrel was pretty much the result of poor marital communication.

In this final book of the TrunkWax trilogy, Howard Lentzner combines a rollicking travel adventure with a serious study of the worldwide universe of bees. In his quest for the bee products that are major components in the TrunkWax formula, bee lover Hrubel Kwasnik journeys from Pylewood to Eastern Europe and finally on to Ecuador. The author, a gardener and bee hobbyist, offers the reader an introduction to the vast, mostly unknown, world of bees: their habits, chemistry, and worldwide presence.