The title of Jukes's book is as delightful as the book itself, offering as it does a hint that this will be about more than hive tools and honey production. And indeed this book is just as much about people and our relationships with one another as it is about beekeeping…This book is not big on action, flowing as slowly as golden honey…While you will undoubtedly learn something new about bees, this is, first and foremost, a successful and eloquent piece of modern nature writing.
An inspiring, up-close portrait of tending to a honeybee hive-a year of living dangerously-watching and capturing the wondrous, complex universe of honeybees and learning an altogether different way of being in the world.
"As strange, beautiful, and unexpected, as precise and exquisite in its movings as bees in a hive. I loved it."--Helen Macdonald, author of H*Is for Hawk
**
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as the author is entering her thirties and feeling disconnected in her life. Uneasy about her future and struggling to settle into her new house in Oxford with its own small garden, she is brought back to a time of accompanying a friend in London-a beekeeper-on his hive visits. And as a gesture of good fortune for her new life, she is given a colony of honeybees. According to folklore, a colony, freely given, brings good luck, and Helen Jules embarks on a rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper.
*
Jukes writes about what it means to “keep” wild creatures; on how to live alongside beings whose laws and logic are so different from our own . . . She delves into the history of beekeeping and writes about discovering the ancient, haunting, sometimes disturbing relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing.
*
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is a book of observation, of the irrepressible wildness of these fascinating creatures, of the ways they seem to evade our categories each time we attempt to define them. Are they wild or domestic? Individual or collective? Is honey an animal product or is it plant-based? As the author's colony grows, the questions that have, at first compelled her interest to fade away, and the inbetweenness, the unsettledness of honeybees call for a different kind of questioning, of consideration.
*
A subtle yet urgent mediation on uncertainty and hope, on solitude and friendship, on feelings of restlessness and on home; on how we might better know ourselves. A book that shows us how to be alert to the large and small creatures that flit between and among us and that urge us to learn from this vital force so necessary to be continuation of life on planet Earth.
An inspiring, up-close portrait of tending to a honeybee hive-a year of living dangerously-watching and capturing the wondrous, complex universe of honeybees and learning an altogether different way of being in the world.
"As strange, beautiful, and unexpected, as precise and exquisite in its movings as bees in a hive. I loved it."--Helen Macdonald, author of H*Is for Hawk
**
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as the author is entering her thirties and feeling disconnected in her life. Uneasy about her future and struggling to settle into her new house in Oxford with its own small garden, she is brought back to a time of accompanying a friend in London-a beekeeper-on his hive visits. And as a gesture of good fortune for her new life, she is given a colony of honeybees. According to folklore, a colony, freely given, brings good luck, and Helen Jules embarks on a rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper.
*
Jukes writes about what it means to “keep” wild creatures; on how to live alongside beings whose laws and logic are so different from our own . . . She delves into the history of beekeeping and writes about discovering the ancient, haunting, sometimes disturbing relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing.
*
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is a book of observation, of the irrepressible wildness of these fascinating creatures, of the ways they seem to evade our categories each time we attempt to define them. Are they wild or domestic? Individual or collective? Is honey an animal product or is it plant-based? As the author's colony grows, the questions that have, at first compelled her interest to fade away, and the inbetweenness, the unsettledness of honeybees call for a different kind of questioning, of consideration.
*
A subtle yet urgent mediation on uncertainty and hope, on solitude and friendship, on feelings of restlessness and on home; on how we might better know ourselves. A book that shows us how to be alert to the large and small creatures that flit between and among us and that urge us to learn from this vital force so necessary to be continuation of life on planet Earth.
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees
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Editorial Reviews
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940177078687 |
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Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
Publication date: | 05/05/2020 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |