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

by Helen Jukes

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.

• ISBN10: 1524747866
• ISBN13: 9781524747862
• Publish Date: 5 May 2020 (first published 26 July 2018)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Pantheon
• Format: Hardcover (Deckle Edge)
• Pages: 256
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781524747862

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is a retrospective and philosophical musing over the author's year as a novice beekeeper. Originally published in 2018, this American edition is due out 5th May 2020 from Knopf Doubleday on their Pantheon imprint, it's 256 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.

I'm fond of natural philosophy and I'm a beekeeper and (fanatical) gardener. I was excited to find this book and really enjoyed reading it. It has garnered numerous comparisons to H is for Hawk, which is maybe somewhat apt in that they're both introspective memoirs by British women with more than a little life examination and personal philosophy included, but where MacDonald is dour and fierce in voice, Jukes is more gentle, humorous, bewildered, and full of ennui. I found a much more apt comparison with Sue Hubbell's work.

Either way, I found this a worthwhile and relaxing read. There's no distinct narrative arc or distinctly promoted message. There is introspection and historical comparison against the cycle of seasons and lives, human and insect.

Beautifully and lyrically written. Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.