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Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey--The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World, by Holley Bishop
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Honey has been waiting almost ten million years for a good biography. Bees have been making this prized food -- for centuries the world's only sweetener -- for millennia, but we humans started recording our fascination with it only in the past few thousand years. Part history, part love letter, Robbing the Bees is a celebration of bees and their magical produce, revealing the varied roles of bees and honey in nature, world civilization, business, and gastronomy.
To help navigate the worlds and cultures of honey, Bishop -- beekeeper, writer, and honey aficionado -- apprentices herself to Donald Smiley, a professional beekeeper who harvests tupelo honey in the Florida panhandle. She intersperses the lively lore and science of honey with lyrical reflections on her own and Smiley's beekeeping experiences. Its passionate research, rich detail, and fascinating anecdote and illustrations make Holley Bishop's Robbing the Bees a sumptuous look at the oldest, most delectable food in the world.
- Sales Rank: #1003505 in Books
- Published on: 2006-02-01
- Released on: 2006-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x .90" w x 5.50" l, .66 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Review
"With this elegant new book, Holley Bishop joins Sue Hubbell and Edwin Way Teale as one of the most engaging ambassadors to bees we've ever had. Written with grace and wit...as seductive as an open jar of tupelo honey."
-- Robert Michael Pyle, author of Chasing Monarchs
"Bishop's book reads like a novel -- the narrative unfolding like an escapist yarn or film, with Bishop and her bees as the players and the humid fields of Florida as her stage."
-- The Salt Lake Tribune
"Holley Bishop's love affair with honeybees combines natural and social history with gastronomy and memoir to produce a delicious reading experience."
-- Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire
Amazon.com Review
Holley Bishop loves bees. No, more than that: she idolizes them. She marvels at their native abilities and the momentous role these misunderstood and unjustly feared creatures have played in the development of human history. And with her book, Robbing the Bees, she succeeds in making the reader love bees, too. Take this nifty bit of information, one of countless fascinating factoids offered by Bishop in her celebration of all things bee-related: "Because of bees' starring role in the drama of pollination, we humans are indebted to them, directly and indirectly, for a third of our food supply. Visiting bees are required for the commercial production of more than a hundred of our most important crops including alfalfa, garlic, apples, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, citrus, melons, onion, almonds, turnips, parsley, sunflower, cranberries, and clover." Or how about this: "For the past decade, the American military has been testing [bees'] potential as special agents in the war on drugs and terrorism. Bees are as sensitive to odor as dogs and can be trained to buzz in on drugs, explosives, landmines, and chemical weapons." Beat that as a winning opening gambit at a cocktail party. And that ain't all. Bishop charts the evolution of honey and beeswax harvesting through the ages, gives us an up-close look inside working beehives from ancient Egypt to the present day, interviews beekeepers, quotes bee chroniclers past and present (from Charles Darwin to contemporary Florida beekeeper Donald Smiley), reveals her rather clumsy foray into beekeeping in candid detail, studies bees' impact on religion and history, and provides a selection of innovative recipes calling for honey. Through it all, Bishop never loses sight of the star if the show--the humble honey bee--or the crucial but largely unrewarded role they continue to play on our planet. And she does it with snappy prose and keen humor. Dogs be warned: if Bishop has her way, bees will be the it pet of the future, or at least less likely to die at the end of a folded newspaper next time one buzzes in through an open window. --Kim Hughes
From Publishers Weekly
When former New York literary agent Bishop bought a Connecticut farmstead, she began keeping bees as a way of savoring her newfound reverence for nature in the edible form of fresh honey, a passion that now yields this engaging study of the history, science and art of beekeeping. She details the biology of the "always gracious, economical and neat" insects; explores the complex, pheromone-besotted hive society that yokes the proverbially busy insects to the tasks of comb building, nectar gathering and larvae nourishing; and eulogizes their stubborn, self-immolating defense of their honey against human pillagers. And she chronicles humanity's millennia-long expropriation of the bee's gifts of honey, beeswax, pollen and venom to provide food and drink (a chapter of honey-themed recipes is included), nutritional supplements, arthritis remedies and even weapons of war. Tying it all together is a profile of salt-of-the-earth commercial beekeeper Donald Smiley, harvester of specialty honey gathered from tupelo tree blossoms in the drowsy hum of the Florida panhandle, and emblem of the fruitful alliance of two legs with six. Bishop's impulse to visit every flower of bee lore sometimes weighs the book down with quotes from bee enthusiasts of the past, but her combination of engrossing natural history and down-home reportage make this a fitting homage to one of nature's most admirable creatures. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Who knew bees could be such a fascinating topic?
By C. Good
Holley Bishop has done an excellent job of researching and writing a book about the history & uses of something that most people take for granted. _Robbing the Bees_ reminds me of Kurlansky's book about salt, and while it's not quite as dense or as long as _Salt: A World History_, it's just as readable and interesting.
Ms. Bishop is very honest about it being a happy coincidence that got her into beekeeping, and not a preplanned move. She clearly enjoys the beekeeping, and between her anecdotes and those of Mr. Smiley, a professional beekeeper in Florida, new beekeepers are given a thorough background in the economics, markets, equipment, pitfalls, and rewards of beekeeping.
She gives quite a bit of detail on the history of beekeeping, including Egyptian & Roman practices, medieval European practices, and some of the relatively recent advances (such as design of the hives, with removable supers) that have made beekeeping what it is today. There is also discussion of uses for beeswax, and how renting of honeybees for pollination has helped improve yields for agricultural crops.
There is also a large amount of scientific information, such as the life cycle of honeybees, how they gather pollen and how they use nectar & pollen in the hive, how they produce wax, and some of the chemical properties of honey.
There is also a recipe section that is quite nice all by itself.
My few quibbles have to do with lack of information. For instance, she states that tupelo honey is sought after because of its taste and because its sugars won't crystallize. But it's not explained WHY tupelo honey won't crystallize, while other honeys will. And what is the difference between honeybees and the larger louder bumblebees that I sometimes see going from flower to flower? And why isn't there a bibliography?
Having been stung a few times as a child, I have been fairly disinterested in bees, except to avoid them. But after reading Holley Bishop's book, I understand they are much more interesting and beneficial than it appears on the surface. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I am not yet ready to get my own beehive -- but if any book ever convinces me to give beekeeping a try, it will probably be _Robbing the Bees_.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
A paean to bees, honey, and wax
By Mr. Joe
"But if a man be grown old, and have a loose and hanging member, he shall do this. Of seed of rocket, cumin, pepper, and seed of purslain, being bruised and made up with honey, let him take it morning and evening. It is incomparable."
Who needs the expense of Viagra?
In ROBBING THE BEES, author Holley Bishop, herself an amateur bee keeper for six years, has penned an eminently readable and loving tribute to bees, honey, and beeswax. While not a thriller, nor perhaps one you can't put down, it is at the top of the genre of books that teaches us a little bit about the world we inhabit, and which focuses on a subject about which the reader likely gives little thought. I mean, honey is on the supermarket shelf in those cute, squeezable, plastic bears. What more is there to know, right?
A relatively small portion of the text - regrettably too little - describes Bishop's own experience raising bees. Rather, she was invited by Florida bee keeper and honey merchant, Donald Smiley, to accompany him on his daily rounds over the course of a year as he moved his apiaries from place to place following the seasonal emergence of the various blossoms that provide the pollen and nectar that nourish the bees' hive and ultimately provide Mankind with one of its most historically significant food staples. Also, we learn that, over the millennia, honey has also served as drink, food preservative, money, and medicine. Thus, the quote from a 1685 Persian medical manual that heads this review.
Bishop doesn't neglect beeswax, which has served to embalm bodies, provide light as candles, waterproof leather armor, polish furniture, floors and walls, mend cracked pottery, cement mosaic tiles, remove stains from marble, and serve as the substrate for lipstick and crayons.
As for the bees themselves, Holly describes their life cycle and hive environment, their amazing ability for comb construction, and their accidental but vital contribution to plant pollination (without which supermarket produce sections wouldn't be the same).
In short, because ROBBING THE BEES is a masterpiece of good press, I'll never look at that busy insect in the same way ever again. Cockroaches should be as lucky.
55 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent MS on a Most Important Subject. Buy It!
By B. Marold
`Robbing the Bees, A Biography of Honey (The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World' by novice beekeeper and first time book author, Holley Bishop is a great little read, with a subject matter very similar to Mark Kurlansky's works, `Cod' and `Salt' but with an engaging style similar to `New Yorker' writer, Susan Orlean, author of `The Orchid Thief'. The fact that the primary subjects in both Orleans' and Bishop's books live and work in Florida is pure coincidence.
Bishop evokes Orleans' style by switching back and forth between three main narrative lines. The opening line chronicles Bishop's own foray into beekeeping at her rural Connecticut home. This thread gives us an excellent firsthand picture of the trials of a real beekeeping novice. In the first chapter, we are introduced to the star of the second and, in many ways, the most important thread. This is Donald Smiley, a successful operator of a modest but growing beekeeping operation in the Florida panhandle who, upon being contacted by Bishop had 600 hives which grew to over a thousand in the three year course of writing this book. Aside from the fact that Smiley was the only professional beekeeper to answer Bishop's letter of inquiry, his operation is interesting because the collecting of the very interesting tupelo honey from blossoms native to the southern U.S. swamps is a major part of Smiley's yearly routine. Tupelo honey is distinguished from almost all others in that its sugars never crystallize out of the liquid honey.
The story of Smiley's yearly routine is one that makes one scratch ones head in wonder over how anyone can like such a demanding schedule. But since thousands of beekeepers, just like professional chefs, commonly put in twelve to sixteen hour days and love every minute of it, one has to believe the psychic rewards to such a life are high. Smiley does have the advantage of being self-employed AND of running a business which give him an income at about twice the average of rural Florida panhandle residents. The hard part only begins with the dangers of dealing with stinging bees that are, at best, disinterested partners in the collection of honey and beeswax. In order to create a true tupelo or orange or clover specific honey, Smiley and his assistants must run through all 600 to 1000 hives and harvest what is in the hives, clean the honeycomb racks of every last trace of the previous honey, replace the honeycomb racks, and move all these hives to locations close to where the target blossoms or flowers are just opening. And, all of this has to be done in two or three days so the bees can catch the blossoms just as they start to open.
The third thread in Bishop's book covers the backstory of honey, bees, and beeswax. I give Bishop serious extra points for remembering to include a chapter on beeswax. While it is a relatively unimportant product today, it is historically exceedingly important. Its surviving use in Moravian candles, for example, just scratches the surface of its uses. If you imagine a world without plastics, rubber, or synthetic hydrocarbons, the importance of wax should become obvious. It was used in waterproofing, preserving, embalming, and beautifying furniture. Bishop doesn't stop with its uses; she also discusses how bees create beeswax and how they use it to build the hexagonal cells of honeycomb. I was particularly interested in the citations of experiments performed by Charles Darwin in revealing how it was that honey bees were able to construct their marvelously geometric structures which just happen to need the least amount of material to contain the greatest volume. The evidence of Darwin's genius never fails to amaze me.
One pitfall which Bishop avoids is a favorite subject of linguistic philosophers back in the 1960's when it was thought that the bees' dance upon returning to the hive was a form of language whereby the bee was telling her colleagues where to find an especially rich source of nectar. This very scholarly topic simply fell to the ground when, I believe, it was discovered that the basis for the dance was to shake loose pollen so that the onlookers could get a sample of the pollen from the rich source of flowers.
Every subject's background is covered with the same excellent selection of material from history and modern science. Most of the illustrations are drawings from the dawn of publishing through the 19th century, the heyday of artistically done drawings of subjects from natural history. The subject of stinging, for example, is covered by anecdotes from the author's own experience and from Smiley's experience plus a brief on how a bee's sting works. Like most things in the natural world, it is a lot more complicated than it appears on the surface. The mechanics of a bee's sting make a modern hypodermic needle look crude. The biochemistry of the bee's venom makes injected medical cocktails look primitive.
If this story has any dark side, it is in the story of the Africanized bees which were introduced into Brazil in the 1950's to create a strain which would do better than European bees in Brazil's tropical climate. The problem arose because these smaller, less productive bees were both more nomadic and more aggressive than their highly productive European cousins. This meant that the Africanized bees have been moving north through the Americas and colonies have already reached the southern United States. Their stings are no worse than European bee stings, but they will go after a human intruder out of sheer aggression, even if the nearby human makes no move to disturb the hive. As there is no known antidote to this moving ecological danger, one wishes we still had Darwin around to provide some clues to solving the problem.
If Bishop's book has any weaknesses at all, it is the absence of a good bibliography and a few minor inaccuracies that got past her copy editors.
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