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

"The hive has become a counterweight to a work environment I've been finding stressful. I've begun to relax out here; to drop some rigid outer casings that were holding me stiffly and rather unhappily in place. The bees are hot and busy inside the hive, and maybe if I can understand them better I might learn something important about how to live."

A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings is a memoir by British writer, beekeeper and tutor, Helen Jukes. Now in Oxford with a new job, Helen Jukes decides she may want to keep bees. As it's November, she won't be able to get her own colony until the spring, so she fills the time learning all she can about them: ancient and more recent history, hives, habits. As she does her research she is "becoming less and less convinced that it's possible to be a purely rational and detached observer of the natural world – or if that's all we'd want to go on, if it were."

"All of the movements and change of the last few years - the string of houses and jobs, the roving friendships – has put me in the habit of expecting things to disappear quickly once found, and in that state of almost permanent temporariness I've caught myself wondering a few times if it's very reasonable to hope to keep anything at all. No wonder the arrival of a colony of bees is triggering my anxieties. Here I am pondering impermanence, having just tasked myself with the responsibility of keeping something – with sustaining it. A colony is not a book or an archivable object and you can't hold it in a glass cabinet or on a shelf. It is live and shifting and if this one doesn't take to our little rectangular space it'll be put of here faster than you can say swarm."

The pace is sedate: there's no major action and the bees don't even turn up until March. But it's interesting and, surprisingly, quite moving at times, and Jukes makes many insightful observations about life, about the world we live in and our attitude to it. The prose is often beautiful and with the perilous state of bees in today's world, it's a timely read. An outstanding debut.