Adventuresinbeeland's Blog

I first found out about this beekeeping memoir after reading a review of it on the Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group blog – Helen Jukes was a member of the group while she lived in Oxford.

A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings has already received favourable reviews in the national press (for example, in the Guardian). The story goes like this – busy as a bee, but one working in frustrated disharmony with her surroundings and hive mates, Helen is persevering at her new charity job based in Oxford. She is sharing with a friend in a rented house which they are trying to make feel more like a home. She’s recently moved from London, where she assisted commercial beekeeper Luke Dixon with some of his inspections (Luke has written Keeping Bees in Towns and Cities, which I also own).

Helen’s friends cotton on to how much she misses Luke’s bees, so they cluster together to buy her a colony of bees for Christmas. On the advice of Luke, she buys a top-bar hive to host the colony. This leads her to join the Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group. I was amused by her description of her first group meeting, in which clear divisions were obvious between the members. Even in a group all about ‘natural’ beekeeping, there is a wide spectrum of keeping behaviours, from never opening the hive to regularly checking for disease. As always, there seem to be as many ways of beekeeping as there are beekeepers.

Helen takes us through her beekeeping journey and the year following the fateful Christmas present, slowly revealing the stages of her colony’s progress, from being collected from a remote rural honey farm to her eventual small harvest.  She uses a simple ‘crush and strain’ method to extract the honey – but as her hive has no queen excluder there is brood within the honey combs, so bees are hatching out in her kitchen as she tries to collect the honey!

The book takes its time – she doesn’t actually get the bees home till page 127 – so you must slow yourself down to bee time to take it all in properly. You can tell that she caught the ‘bee bug’ which I and so many others have been through. In-between long hours in the office she comforts and distracts herself with long hours reading about the history of beekeeping, particularly the experiments of Huber and the trials of Langstroth. She visits an entomologist friend to view a honey bee in magnificently hairy close-up through a microscope. But she doesn’t seem to focus so much on learning the practical side of beekeeping, so it is Luke who explains the basics of swarm control for her colony’s first summer.

I’ll try not to ruin the ending, but along the way she falls in love with a man who her friend thought was a beekeeper… but it turns out he merely has an uncle who’s a beekeeper. Though a young man himself, his hair is “almost completely white”, complemented by eyes which are very blue. She mentions in the book’s final climax that she might have “called something up” through the experience of beekeeping. She has a feeling sometimes that this man she loves is not entirely separate from her hive.

I liked this idea and was playing with it in my mind, musing that perhaps the bees called a man up for their keeper, a man with hair white as fresh new honey comb and blue as their favourite flowers. Or that they opened something up in her which made her better able to cope with the stresses of her job and so more receptive to romance. The bees may not speak in human words, but they call to us in other ways, and they change those of us who feel their pull.

I’d recommend this book if you are interested in finding out more about beekeeping history and the meaning of certain words connected to bees. Through a friend who works for the Oxford English Dictionary, Helen explore the origins of words like ‘keep’ and ‘hive’, which turn out to be quite complex when you discover their many shades of meaning. It’s a very thoughtful book – but its many meanderings may try the patience of some!

I contacted Helen on Twitter asking for her sources behind a mention of commercial beekeepers culling colonies over winter to save money on feeding them. Within 24 hours she had emailed me a number of quotes and links. Very nice, right? So thank you Helen, I enjoyed your book.

The Beekeeper by Dunya Mikhail – available on Amazon (or your local independent bookshop)

I discovered this book while browsing my local library’s catalogue for beekeeping books. Yet it is not a book about beekeeping at all.

Instead Dunya Mikhail tells us about the ongoing work of Abdullah, a beekeeper who courageously uses his business contacts to save Yazidi women of Iraq who have been stolen by Daesh (Isis). He says:

“With the money I made selling honey in Iraq and Syria I was able to help save women captives. […] I cultivated a hive of transporters and smugglers from both sexes to help save our queens, the ones Daeshis call sabaya, sex slaves. We worked like in a beehive, with extreme care and well-planned initiatives.”

With Abdullah’s help, Mikhail – who is an Iraqi poet and academic now living in the US – has gathered together first-person accounts from Yazidi men and women of their experiences with Isis.

Warning: this is a non-fiction book which contains many heartbreaking narratives, so please do not read any further on in this post if you do not feel emotionally up to hearing about the events which have occurred.

The stories the Yazidi recount within the book follow a similar pattern. They flee Isis troops, who pursue them across the country. They leave their homes in a hurried panic, leaving behind their animals and possessions, abandoning everything they ever knew and had worked for. Families with small children and pregnant women flee on foot or donkey across high mountaintops or countryside terrain, where they are inevitably overtaken.

Once captured, the men, women and elderly are separated. Elderly people are thrown into a pit, along with any small children that refuse to leave their grandparents. There they are buried alive. Younger men are lined up in rows and shot in trenches or buses. Not shot in the head, but multiple places across the body, and then left to die, lying on top of each other bleeding to death.

The young women and small children that are left suffer possibly the worst fate. Now grieving, since they have lost all their male or elderly family members in a matter of minutes, they are taken off to be sold at market to the highest bidders. Once sold, the women and children will spend long, gruelling days doing housework or making rockets for their new owners. If their work is not considered good enough, they are savagely beaten. They may or may not receive food; if they do it is only rice. At night, the women – and girls as young as ten too – are raped, sometimes by multiple men. Even being heavily pregnant or just having given birth does not spare them this torture.

Abdullah the beekeeper is one of their few chances of escape. The odds are against them, as their phones are taken away by Isis, they often don’t speak fluent Arabic and they may only have the non-Islamic clothes they were wearing when captured. If they do manage to slip out or break down a door, suspicious eyes watch them and may report them as fugitives. Asking to use a phone in a local business is risky as the owner may demand money or simply turn them in. If, somehow, they manage to get through to a relative or friend who is still alive, who can then contact someone like Abdullah, they may have some hope of making it out. Alternatively many of Abdullah’s rescues are arranged in advance after he manages to identify where a captured woman is living.

There are some photos in the books of those who made it – and those who didn’t. One of the hardest to see was that of three little boys wrapped in sheets. Their mother, Maha, had escaped along with her twelve year old daughter – who helped her carry her three sons, aged three months, eighteen months and three years. She stopped to ask a shopkeeper for directions to a bus station, but her poor Arabic made the shopkeeper suspicious and he reported her. Her ‘owner’, an Isis hospital director, took them back home and poisoned the three little boys, who died in agony as he beat their mother and sister “with all his strength”.  The tiny bodies of the dead boys were wrapped in sheets and thrown out in the garden – the photo shows only their still little faces emerging from their shrouds, finally at peace. A neighbour who witnessed Maha transfixed next to their bodies finally helped her and her daughter escape – but she cried to Abdullah, “What good is it that I survived? I wish I had died there with them. I wish they had buried me in that garden.” 

What can any of us do to help the survivors who have lost so much?  One option might be giving to a charity like War Child, which is running a Yazidi appeal, or Doctors without Borders, which provides medical aid to communities around the world, including Iraq.
And reading the book and/or recommending it to others helps spread the word, so that these stories are shared.