A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees

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.

Author: Helen Jukes
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 05/05/2020
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.30h x 5.80w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781524747862


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/25/2019
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2020
Library Journal 04/01/2020 pg. 119

About the Author
HELEN JUKES was born in London, England, and grew up in the Midlands. She studied at the University of Nottingham and Goldsmiths College. Jukes was among the founding members of the Bee Friendly Trust and tutors at the creative writing program at Oxford University. She lives in Derbyshire, England.