Early on in Helen Jukes’s A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings she ponders the increasing popularity of urban beekeeping, referring to the idea that “one possible psychological response to the apprehension of a threat is to begin producing idealised versions of the thing we perceive of as being at risk”. That’s also a good explanation for the current crop of bee books: not just A Honeybee Heart and Thor Hanson’s Buzz, but Kate Bradbury’s wonderful The Bumblebee Flies Anyway and Maja Lunde’s The History of Bees, among others. Books, like hives, are ways of capturing something and holding on to it: either helping to preserve it, or looking at it closely before it’s gone.
A Honeybee Heart is in the tradition of H Is for Hawk and other recent works that combine natural history with memoir. Some have felt rather stale and derivative, or have overplayed the author’s emotional link with the creature in question. Happily, Jukes avoids this: she’s interested in bees because, well, bees are interesting, and if anything the personal side is played down, particularly at the start of the book.
Having had some experience helping a beekeeper in London, she decides to get a hive not long after moving to Oxford. Bored in her job, restless and lacking stable attachments, Jukes discovers that keeping bees helps to anchor her, and she explores the way in which they change her, just as her efforts alter the behaviour of the bees. There’s some satisfying (if at times slightly pat) mirroring as the personal and apine sides of the book progress in tandem, but she wears her considerable research lightly. I only wish I could have envisaged her hive better: it’s a “top bar” type rather than the more familiar Langstroth, and her descriptions of what the bees were building each time she opened it seemed fascinating, but went clean over my head. It is not unreasonable to ask how many more nature memoirs the market can support; the answer, I think, is only the best. Finely written and insightful, A Honeybee Heart is surely one of them.
Like Jukes, Hanson is aware of his own subjectivity and writes himself (and bee-loving son Noah) into the narrative; gone are the days when natural history writing was dry and high-handed, a style born from a presumption of objectivity when decisions about what is and isn’t studied, and how knowledge is transmitted, are anything but. He is a US conservation biologist, and has previously published books about gorillas, feathers and seeds. His latest, Buzz, focuses mainly on wild bees rather than Apis mellifera, describing their evolution, interaction with plants, relationship with humans and the challenges facing them now. It’s popular science at its most accessible: fun, fascinating and full of engaging pen portraits of the scientists and bee enthusiasts he meets in the course of his research.
Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters
After a rather flat start discussing sphecid wasps, proto-bees and evolution, Hanson travels to Arizona to learn about taxonomy and physiology at something called the Bee Course. A visit to a retired mason bee supplier prompts an explanation of solitary bee behaviour; pollination is examined in relation to Beth Norden, co-discoverer of a key species in the quest to understand how flowers and bees grew to depend on one another. Each chapter is loosely structured around a place, a person and/or a type of bee, providing the opportunity for wider discussion both of bees and of our relationship with them. Only a trip to a McDonald’s to remove everything bee-dependent from a Big Mac feels gimmicky; fortunately, he quickly moves on to a California date plantation where he discovers the arduous nature of hand-pollination (and the reason dates cost so much).
Roughly 40% of all bee species are in decline or threatened with extinction, and by the final section of this book Hanson’s sense of wonder has rubbed off on us so that his meeting with an entomologist who recorded the extinction of a bumblebee really hits home. The discussion addresses the complex forces contributing to bee decline and lays bare human involvement. Catastrophic factors include a globalised trade in fruit, vegetables and bees themselves; the consequent spread of natural pests and pathogens; the interaction in bees’ bodies of a range of agrichemicals never tested in combination; intensification of land use with a resulting loss of biodiversity and the creation of crop monocultures.
But Hanson leaves us with hope: a visit to an almond orchard that is bringing bees back to a landscape from which they have long been absent – commercial hives trucked in for three weeks to pollinate, but the groves kept insect-free the rest of the year. Hanson rightly credits the turnaround to relationships built between individuals: growers, researchers, investors, heads of multinational conglomerates and conservationists at NGOs. There is something about bees, it seems, that can really bring people together; let’s hope it isn’t too late.
• A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is published by Scribner. To buy a copy for £10.49 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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Buzz is published by Icon. To buy a copy for £11.99 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
