Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163211 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743250221
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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.

From The Washington Post
That buzz on the horizon isn't a swarm of bees, it's a swarm of books about bees. Holley Bishop's publicist describes her Robbing the Bees as "the first comprehensive biography" of honey and its creators. I suspect the assertion might be as welcome as a bear in the beeyard to Hattie Ellis, author of Sweetness & Light, and Stephen Buchmann, author of Letters from the Hive, and for that matter, Tammy Horn, who has just penned Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation.

This surfeit of spring titles (the last not part of this review) may be a nightmare for the competing authors. But for beekeepers or people who are simply wise enough to recognize and love the honeybee, this attention is all to the good. Apis mellifera is in need of a few champions. Misunderstood or even overlooked, the honeybee (along with other insects) provides one-third of our food supply through the "powers of pollination," as Ellis reminds us. Bishop notes that the California almond crop, which is three-fourths of the world's supply, is produced because growers rent more than a million hives at blossom time.

In recent years, new pests have decimated managed and wild colonies, made beekeeping an onerous (though deeply satisfying) task and reduced the ranks of hobbyists and smalltime commercial apiarists. Pests, chemical poisoning and loss of habitat represent some of the alarms raised in each of the books. Moreover, the authors hope that celebrating the bee will lead more of us to seek to nurture it.

Alas, beekeepers who have stuck with the bee often face virulent hostility from neighbors who confuse bees with yellowjackets and fear death by stinging. Honeybees can be waspish if mishandled or queenless, but in my own modest two-hive operation in Alexandria, Va., I can intrude into the colony of 60,000 bees for an hour without a single sting. Thankfully, I have been able to enlighten neighbors, who share the harvest. These books share something even more precious: the bee's story, which is to say an account of the miracle of life.

Buchmann, a bee scientist and erstwhile beekeeper, has spent a lifetime around the insects. He still ponders the hexagonal cells of the honeycomb, and how the female worker bee draws them out in regurgitated wax, in perfect rank and file. "How the geometric combs are constructed by the workers without a supervisor, blueprints, rulers, or protractors remains a mystery," he writes in Letters From the Hive. Beekeepers and honey plunderers have been fascinated for thousands of years by the sight of a returning worker bee dancing in the dark hive, but it was not until a few decades ago that the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch began to unlock the secret of the dance. There are various accounts of this in each of the books. The direction and vigor of the bee's movements serve as a roadmap directing the other bees to a source of fresh nectar. From the bee's seemingly inscrutable gyrations, writes Hattie Ellis in Sweetness & Light, co-workers can discern the direction, distance, quality and quantity of a new nectar source: "not bad for 'just' an insect." Indeed, as Ellis notes, "the discovery that these tiny creatures could perform such complex mental feats was a complete surprise to many, and opened human eyes to the capabilities of the animal world."

Ellis's prose is welcoming even if her project -- seeking to tie together millennia of human contact with the bee -- necessarily spreads like spilled honey. She and the other authors help remind us how dependent we are on the bee, not just for pollination but to provide comforts we now take for granted -- illumination in a murky world, by way of the candle, and sweetness. Before the cultivation of sugar cane and sugar beet in the West, our sources of sweetness were fruit, which is fleeting, and honey, which stores well. This gave rise to Jonathan Swift's reference to the hive as the source of "sweetness and light," from which Ellis's title derives. Ellis does not profess to be a beekeeper and yet does a creditable job of explaining the bee and what this little striped wonder has done for us and our ancestors.

I am struck by Ellis's account of three men. In 17th-century Holland, Jan Swammerdam made his mark looking at bees under the newly discovered microscope. With blades so small they had to be sharpened microscopically, he dissected the parts of the bee and recorded them in anatomical drawings that remain scientifically valuable. He showed the stinger to be barbed, and, by drawing the ovaries of the queen, showed how this insect alone could populate a whole colony. This obsession took its toll, Ellis writes, and Swammerdam died in his 43rd year "like a worker bee, falling in the field, all energy spent."

The second figure is a Philadelphia clergyman named Lorenzo Langstroth, the father of modern beekeeping. Centuries earlier, beekeepers had advanced from merely harvesting wild colonies in tree trunks to husbanding them, typically in straw skeps or hollow logs or wooden boxes. This is a clumsy way of raising a hive, for the bees' method is to fill every space with comb and then caulk out the world with an amazing sealant called propolis. The hive had to be destroyed to be harvested. Langstroth, in the 1840s, discovered that the bee always kept a space of 3/8ths of an inch at various points to allow the free flow of the hive's inhabitants. This led to the invention, little changed today, of a hive of neatly hanging frames with bee spaces -- a hive that keepers can readily enlarge and dismantle in order to harvest honey and examine the colony without destroying it.

Then there is the German monk Brother Adam (1898-1996), who spent most of his life at the Benedictine Buckfast Abbey in England raising new and stronger strains of queen bees and in doing so helped repopulate sickened English hives. "His memory is treasured by beekeepers," Ellis writes, not least for "the superb heather honey mead he would offer to guests for a midmorning drink." In similar vein, Sweetness & Light is a refreshing toast to the honey bee.

Apis mellifera is the most efficient and productive species of bee, but other bees have been harvested for years. Buchmann begins Letters From the Hive with a gripping account of his forays in Malaysia with ethnic Malays, hunting honey from a huge, beautiful but menacing bee called Apis dorsata. The hunts have changed little in centuries and require assent from the sultan, prayers to the forest spirits and a great deal of courage. At night, harvesters climb tall trees to plunder colossal hives that hang like inverted rainbows beneath tree limbs. The bees themselves form a protective cover of the comb, larvae, pollen and honey. To dislodge them, the hunter uses a torch to generate sparks, which the bees chase to the jungle floor, leaving the hive unguarded. Observing the spectacle, Buchmann writes: "Soon a cascade of orange embers rained down like a meteor shower from the branches overhead. No Fourth of July fireworks display has ever been so memorable for me."

Buchmann's book, written with Banning Repplier, brings a deeper, more scientific insight to the subject than the others do. But the accounts of bee-hunting rituals at the beginning of the book are so spellbinding that the subsequent chapters about bee history fall flat. Still, plow through the recipes and you get to appendices where Buchmann's scientific knowledge once more engages the reader. He says that less than one percent of the U.S. population is allergic to bee venom and that the honey bee is responsible for approximately 17 deaths a year. Unfortunate, but not grounds for mass hysteria given that the bee provides so much of our food through crop pollination.

In her introduction to Robbing the Bees, Holley Bishop tells of fleeing New York for a farm in Connecticut where she meets a beekeeper, takes a swig of honey, and has her bee epiphany. This formula of Nature rescuing the crisis-ridden rat racer is by now as old as the hills, but still the titles keep appearing. Luckily, Bishop quickly jettisons the genre and gets down to writing about bees in a highly entertaining way. She does this by weaving three strands together, the by now obligatory story of the bee in human history with her own hobby of beekeeping and the story of a smalltown commercial beekeeper in the Florida Panhandle.

We are introduced to Donald Smiley, an industrious bee farmer with 700 hives and a beautiful devotion to the creatures in his charge. Beekeeping has a rich tradition in rural America, and Smiley is a worthy exponent. In one snapshot, we find him holding frames to the light, looking for one white speck in every cell, each a forager in the making. "If you've got eggs, you've got honey," he says.

These are all commendable books. I started out thinking Bishop's would be a drone, but it turned out to be the queen.

Reviewed by Adrian Higgins
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A beautifully written book that is sweet to the last drop
The first time I read ROBBING THE BEES (I have now read it twice), I was on three hour flight across the country. Normally distracted and restless on airplanes, I plunged into this great book from the first page and was so happy to have the uninterrupted time to read it straight through!Somewhat surprisingly, I became completely absorbed by a subject that I didn't expect to be so fascinating, but the author's fluid writing and gorgeous descriptions were enough to draw me in so much that I didn't even notice the passage of time.

Everything about this book, from the fascinating history of beekeeping and honey, to the anecdotes about the quirky Florida beekeeper Don Smiley, move the book along wonderfully. What I really found to be intriguing though, was the intimate tone of the writing and the author's personal story. The fact that she found a home with her bees resonated with me, and I felt an appreciation for the craft of keeping bees more than I ever thought I would.

I highly reccommend this book to anyone who would like to learn more about bees and honey and anyone who appreciates sitting down with an excellent book.

Excellent MS on a Most Important Subject. Buy It!
`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.

Neither a beekeeper nor a gardner but I loved this book.
Bees were something to swat when I was growing up and honey never eclipsed my love of chocolate. All that has changed since I read this engrossing, gorgeously written history of the world through the eyes of a beekeeper. I loved the writing, the historical view, the personal stories, the intricacies of hives and, for a city kid, the sense of wonder at seeing Mother Nature at work. But more important, I came away with a new understanding of the interconnectedness of life. If bees were to disappear from the face of the earth we would perish. Bee power! Who knew?