HONEYBEE HEART HAS FIVE OPENINGS: A Year of Keeping Bees

Blending biography and natural history and a meditation on what it means to keep your first bee colony, Jukes relates with wonder, awe and dogged determination 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 the author enters her 30s, she is feeling disconnected in her life, uneasy about her future and struggling to settle into her new home in Oxford with its own small back 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 Jukes embarks on a rewarding, perilous journey of beekeeping as she delves into the history of beekeeping and writes about discovering the ancient, haunting and sometimes disturbing relationship between the keeper and the bee, and an observation of the irrepressible wildness of these fascinating creatures, individual and 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 fade away into her meditation on solitude and friendship, on feelings of restlessness and on home, and how we might better know ourselves and our place on planet Earth. US import with 233 roughcut pages, small remainder mark, illus.