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A review by lkedzie
Heart of the Hive: Inside the Mind of the Honey Bee and the Incredible Life Force of the Colony by Hilary Kearney
5.0
This review contains less than 0.04% bee-related puns.
This book is a natural history on the honey bee by a beekeeper and popular beekeeping blogger. It may start a bit grade school science pageant, but by about the midpoint the author has gotten through the preliminaries on what a bee is, and start talking about how it is, more interesting aspects of bee behavior, life cycle, and the sort of narrative that is a hive. And here it takes off, hitting a good balance between the descriptive and the scientific, still in coffee table mode but with detail on recent research to give it heft.
The photography is arresting, intense, close nature photography, which put me off at first. On further consideration, it works. The book, particularly the back 2/3rds, is more science-focused and discussing different research and ideas about bees, and as such the ultra-detailed pictures are part of that, a scholarly investigation of the honey bee as pictorial accompaniment.
While I appreciated the science, of equal highlight is the author's stories and asides about her beekeeping. These are fun. I like that they both include the more anecdotal, but also the author's interpretation of the other material, the way that her experience informs whatever theoretical idea. And in a thread that may be one of the more unusual that I have brought into a review, the book's dedication to the author's son is about his finding a passion equal to the author's, operates as a sort of sub-theme to the book: the world is full of things that have endless depth to them, and what is best in life is to find what that thing with endless depth is for you.
And when the book ends on the author telling about her love of bees becoming a respect for non-charismatic insect species, and a hope that others might find this too, it made this awwneverter smile.
My thanks to the author, Hilary Kearney, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Storey Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
This book is a natural history on the honey bee by a beekeeper and popular beekeeping blogger. It may start a bit grade school science pageant, but by about the midpoint the author has gotten through the preliminaries on what a bee is, and start talking about how it is, more interesting aspects of bee behavior, life cycle, and the sort of narrative that is a hive. And here it takes off, hitting a good balance between the descriptive and the scientific, still in coffee table mode but with detail on recent research to give it heft.
The photography is arresting, intense, close nature photography, which put me off at first. On further consideration, it works. The book, particularly the back 2/3rds, is more science-focused and discussing different research and ideas about bees, and as such the ultra-detailed pictures are part of that, a scholarly investigation of the honey bee as pictorial accompaniment.
While I appreciated the science, of equal highlight is the author's stories and asides about her beekeeping. These are fun. I like that they both include the more anecdotal, but also the author's interpretation of the other material, the way that her experience informs whatever theoretical idea. And in a thread that may be one of the more unusual that I have brought into a review, the book's dedication to the author's son is about his finding a passion equal to the author's, operates as a sort of sub-theme to the book: the world is full of things that have endless depth to them, and what is best in life is to find what that thing with endless depth is for you.
And when the book ends on the author telling about her love of bees becoming a respect for non-charismatic insect species, and a hope that others might find this too, it made this awwneverter smile.
My thanks to the author, Hilary Kearney, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Storey Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.