A Keeper of Bees
Notes on Hive and Home
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
I was hooked. Call it adrenaline surge, call it honeybee venom in my veins–whatever the explanation, henceforth I would need these funky little critters in my life. Givers of sweet, thick honey, bringers forth of the fruits from trees and bushes and who knew what else, they also gave more food for thought than a body could know what to do with.
–from A Keeper of Bees
Allison Wallace’s devotion to honeybees and their amazing, intensely lived lives started years ago, when she was living in a cabin in the North Carolina woods. Ever since then, wherever she has called home, Wallace has kept company with bees. Now she gives us the honeybee in all its glory, dancing “the great, never fully knowable ecological dance,” striving like other creatures and plants to be all it can be in its short life.
With a philosopher’s perception and a scientist’s knowledge, Wallace interweaves the facts of honeybee biology with reflections on desire, intimacy, work, evolution, memory, and home. She shares the thrill of intimately observing thousands of busy bees cozily ensconced in their brilliantly designed, perfectly weatherproofed hive. She muses on the female workers’ unceasing activity, and on the male drones’ idleness as each awaits his acrobatic midair mating with the queen, followed by his instant death. She marvels at the cosseted queen, upon whom the future of the hive depends.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When she's talking bees, beekeeper and American studies professor Wallace rolls right along, her affection for the little buzzers quite apparent. In a chatty voice, she reflects on all things bee, from how their senses work to what the tendency to swarm is all about (to establish a new hive in response to overpopulation in the first hive) and how each bee serves the hive through various stages of life. She reveals how honey is made (spit is involved) and how the hive, itself an organism of sorts, functions. At times Wallace touches briefly, and sometimes all too glibly, on global environmental issues. Her narrative leaves traces of her personal involvement with bees, though the reader only really gains insight into her personality late in the book: In a section full of potential, she reveals that without the social link her ex-husband provided, she "could happily have holed up in the bottomland woods and gone slowly, ecstatically mad" and describes her tension with the hive of human society as a single woman in midlife. Still, Wallace leaves much unsaid, and this is as close as we get to understanding how the hive is linked to her own life.