Before Huber loved bees, he loved books. As a boy, he read voraciously and tirelessly, so much so that his bookishness was considered to be the cause of his loss of eyesight at age fifteen. Thereafter, his love of books did not wane: for the remainder of his life he was read to faithfully by his eventual wife, Maria Lullin, and his loyal servant, François Burnens. (Burnens was his pair of eyes and his indispensable collaborator over his several years spent studying the honeybee.) Huber also wrote a landmark book himself, New Observations on the Natural History of Bees (1792). It consists of a series of letters, written in a narratively compelling, episodic plain-style, addressed to contemporary Swiss bee expert Charles Bonnet. Early in the book, Huber describes his personally designed observation hives that aided close inspection into the world of the honeybee: these were ‘Book, or Leaf-hives’ – flat frames that opened up like pages so the bees could be ‘read’ on both sides. In Huber, the naturalist, the beekeeper, and the bibliophile communicated with vitality and ease.

Huber is one of the more unlikely and most interesting leading players in Helen Jukes’s A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, a work about bees and books. The memoir is not the first work in contemporary literature to consider Huber’s life and work: the poet Nick Flynn’s Blind Huber (2002) and the novelist Sara George’s The Beekeeper’s Pupil (2002) give fictionalised accounts of the fascinating naturalist. Jukes’s interest in Huber, however, stems more from her reading in the cultural history of the honeybee, including three concurrently written works that are referenced frequently throughout her memoir: Hattie Ellis’s Sweetness and Light: The mysterious history of the honeybee (2004), Bee Wilson’s The Hive: The story of the honeybee and us (2004), and Claire Preston’s Bee (2006). (Beekeeping is clearly enjoying a boomlet.)

An image of an uncovered hive of bees (photo by Maja Dumat/Flickr)

These latter cultural histories enter Jukes’s life as part of an emerging, unexpected interest in beekeeping, detailed in the opening section of the book. Living in Oxford and strained by the demands of her office job, the author thinks back to her fledgling experiences of urban beekeeping in a friend’s hives in London. Her promise to start keeping a backyard hive compels the bookish thirty-year-old to further reading, but it’s not until she is later gifted a hive and a colony that she makes good on this vow. The memoir tracks her year of living and learning as a novice apiarist: from her spontaneous decision to get a hive in November, to the anxious establishment of the colony in early autumn, the equally anxious prospects of the swarm (the departure of her colony) in July, and, finally, her own prospective movements in October.

Much of the book concerns the networks and communities that Jukes’s experiment relies on. These include not only friend circles and beekeeping societies, but the ever-widening company she keeps in her library. The more captivating sections follow her reading adventures from ancient and Enlightenment natural history and philosophy to contemporary science and cultural studies. Huber, whose letters she tracks down in the British Library (another hive), is the principal mainstay. In the ‘reading’ sections of the book, we read and learn with her; we are held in those processes, which are recorded with neither foresight nor hindsight.

An illustration of François Huber (photo via Wikimedia Commons)In reading Huber, if there is a giddy sense of facility between bees and books – and beekeeping and book-writing – Jukes is a little less sure about their unity. On the one hand, she is self-critical about using books as a crutch and about wanting to ‘stick to reading about bees in books, where the words don’t move around like real bees do and everything has been laid out neatly in order’. On the other, she recognises a productive feedback between the two. The bees’ buzzing, dancing language starts to unsettle the hold she has on the language she reads and uses. Faced with her swelling hive and bee-library, words like hive, home, keep, swarm, and observation unhinge and hum with a new poetry.

Bees in Jukes’s writing – as in Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1901 classic The Life of the Bee – are complex, ebullient, perceptive, and adaptable creatures. They are able to wreak welcome havoc on humanity’s need for simplicity, categorisation, and limited ways of seeing – in books and in life. The memoir itself, and its expansion beyond the simple ‘observation journal’ where it began, may reflect the author’s project for an insect-eyed openness to the world around her. As a result, Jukes does tend to give too much space to the charmingly simple and quaint untidiness of her own life: dirty dishes left piled in the sink, chipped mugs, coffee-stained and dog-eared books, her unorthodox love of eating tomato vines. These moments help to pad out her observations about amateur beekeeping into a ‘life’, but they often result in the very comfortable predictability that keeping an anarchic colony of buzzing strangers had supposedly upended. Perhaps they also make us too alert to the less adventurous polities and customs that – to borrow words from a Les Murray bee poem – cushion all this ‘loose talk’ of ‘springtime or freedom’.