Robbing the Bees

A Biography of Honey – The Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World

by Holley Bishop

Free Press, soft cover $14

Reviewed by Ruthie Thompson-Klein

“The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey … and the only reason for making honey is so that I can eat it.”

– A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Robbing the Bees reads like a novel, a memoir, a history and biography of bees. The author backed into beekeeping with no previous experience with bees or even honey. Her obsession and reverence for the bee may have required professional assistance, but her lyrical style and passionate research shine through every fascinating page of this celebration of the world’s most delectable food.

Bishop weaves her experience as an enthusiastic hobbyist with her subject as she shadows Donald Smiley through his beekeeping year. Smiley, a Florida panhandle professional beekeeper, manages more than 1,000 hives – a true beekeeping obsession – his passion and wonder never flagging. The result of this obsession is Tupelo honey – clearest and sweetest you can find. The Tupelo tree is a swampland denizen that dominates Florida prolific wetlands, and Smiley will sell about 115,000 pounds of honey in a good year.

Professional beekeeping is a complicated gamble of moving hives to a desired nectar source before weather changes or blossoms fade and drop. Bishop’s “Robbing” chapter is wonderfully descriptive; you can almost reach in and swipe your fingers across the honey-loaded hives frames. Thank goodness for “Bee-Go,” which keeps bees out of the way temporarily.

Beekeeping as we know it has existed only since the early 19th century. Arduous methods of tracking bees and stealing honey included using a giant swab of plant fiber on a stick. 6000 b.c.e. rock paintings in Spain depict such opportunistic food gathering. The science and craft of keeping hives is an innovation that relieved harvest frustration. Until the extractor was invented in 1890 to collect honey and replace combs fully intact for refill, it was common practice to destroy both hive and bees. Hand-held smoke bellows, gentle and precise, allow modern beekeepers to harvest lots of honey with little labor and few stings and bee deaths.

Bishop details how bees see a flower on their quest for pollen: the inverse of a lighted airport runway at night. Focusing exclusively on one flower species at a time, bees create static electricity in flight, which causes pollen to “jump” and cling to their fur. Though they groom pollen granules into hind leg collection “baskets,” some is loosened and drops into female flowers. In doing so, they fertilize up to one third of our food crops. Cultivators can boost productivity up to 30 percent by using bees.

Bees evolved to be pacifists, taking peaceful advantage of the world’s abundant pollen food source. En masse they can produce a high fear factor, but the sting is a dismemberment too great to survive and used as a last resort. When engaged, the stinger will lock-and-drop like a landing gear or record player needle, the perfect angle to deliver venom. Humans appropriated the sting as a weapon in Medieval warfare, slinging clay pots with bees (“bee bombs”) over enemy ramparts. In modern times bees have been employed as scent detectors; they are 99 percent accurate in detecting explosives and land mines.

Bishop explains that mild-mannered domestic bees are of European descent, but Africanized bees, though virtually identical, are temperamentally dominant and aggressive. The result of good intentions gone wrong, they will pursue an invader by the hundreds for hours over great distances. They have colonized in California and are moving north, adapting as they spread.

The science of wax, medicinal qualities of honey, and recipes round out Bishop’s complete biography of honey. The historic dedication of bees and sweetness of honey hasn’t changed in millions of years. Robbing the Bees illuminates the web of nature: if we take care of them, they’ll take care of us.