Jukes has really given us a lovely read that is full of truth and real empathy. I can fully identify with the disillusionment of office life, of feeling like no matter what you contribute it isn't valuable or enough. I didn't expect to like this book as it's not strictly my "thing", but I really did enjoy it. Thank you for approving this title for me.

I found this book both thought provoking and original. It is about the need to connect with nature and focus on what’s really important in life. It’s beautifully written and utterly enthralling.

*Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Part memoir, part natural history, part romance, part biology - this is a fascinating book about Helen Jukes' journey to become a beekeeper and how the bees affected her life in unexpected ways. I'll be honest, this took me a few attempts to get into. I felt that I wasn't connecting to the author when I was reading the ebook. However, the audiobook was a brilliant medium for this. Although not narrated by the author herself, the narrator did a brilliant job of portraying the wonder and excitement of the beehive and the task of beekeeping.

I am fascinated by bees and the inner workings of the hive. This book did a great job of taking the reader throughout the year, month by month, and showing how the bees go through different processes in different seasons.

The only thing that let this down for me was the author's romance. I understand that this was part of this period of her life but I felt like the link to the story of the bees was tenuous at best. I did enjoy hearing from some of the side characters but others felt unnecessary.

Overall, I enjoyed this read but I felt like some aspects were superfluous. I would recommend it if you want a light natural history book but this won't be for you if you want something more in depth.

3 out of 5 stars!

A fascinating mix of biography, autobiography and natural history, entwined with a meditation on what it means to keep, to love and to find one's place in the world. A must-read.

Having done quite a bit of bee research and reading for my university dissertation, I’m always partial to a good bee book and this one definitely delivers. I found A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings to be well researched and referenced, something that is often missed out of these types of books as journeys like Jukes’ often refer to research in passing but to include a bibliography is uncommon in my experience. Another book I’d compare this to is Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith which is a personal journey guided by research and this type of writing style makes for a very enjoyable read.

And is there honey still for tea………..

Helen Jukes’ A Honeybee heart has Five Openings is a sweet, not saccharine, warm account, filled with the sense of purposeful, satisfying, meaningful feel-good which bees seem to symbolise

It fits neatly into a growing genre of writing-about-the-natural-world which not only includes much interesting scientific information, but is also full of emotional meaning, to the writer herself, as the subjects become part of her own biography, and also casts a wider, philosophical, historical, and even one could say political/environmental net. She explores bees themselves, but her book does not place the writer outside beeworld. She talks about relationship, the relationship she has with the bees, and they with her. This is a book about another species, sure, but not purely a rational, objective analysis of that species. The writer is changed by her encounters with them.

This should certainly appeal to all those who devoured Helen MacDonald’s soulful and intense H is for Hawk. And may even sit better with readers who perhaps were at stages of their own lives where the intensity of emotion which MacDonald explored in her journey, was too much. H is for Hawk certainly had this reader at times riven with connection to my own human suffering. Jukes’ book inhabits some sunnier uplands, and does not take the reader into the darkness of the soul which, surely, we all have at times.

Reading it was an unalloyed pleasure, deeply fascinating

The author felt a calling, after moving from London, where she had at one point assisted a professional who helps those wanting to beekeep, to Oxford. She was at a point in her life where the grind of office work and its stresses seemed to be disconnecting her from inhabiting, properly, her own life – the rush many of us feel trapped in, which can feel aimless and lacking a real direction.

“I like the thought of a stability that comes from fine-tuned communication, and not the sayso of a single ruler. It must be a restless kind of stability , I think. The messages come constantly and from all around, and catching them is more about receptivity than reach”

Bees were both a way to get physical, and out of that kind of metropolitan chatter head, and to be present. Under their influence, Jukes’ found space and time made for reflection and connection. Bee teaching! Friendships, and more are deepened, as the author found how her own connections to the bees were enabling her to open up more to human connections. Bee meditations!

“Through this experience of beekeeping, of learning about and listening tot the colony, I might have called something up – might have begun to articulate and name a capacity I was missing, a connection I needed…..A particular kind of sensitivity, a quality of attention which is…almost like a substance itself……What to do with a feeling like that – which is not rational, and doesn’t fit with the usual categories – except to notice it silently and with a sideways grin as it becomes part of my day-to-day”

To sum up, far more beautifully, something about bee-teaching, than I can conceptualise, is this lovely quote from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet

“Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.”

A memoir about a novice's experience of keeping bees for the first year. Would be more appreciated by people who enjoy nature writing.

I loved this. Since acquiring an allotment in London this year, I have been thinking about keeping bees and this is pushing me toward doing it for sure. Helen Jukes has written a warm and loving story about beekeeping through moments of real change in her life. Her capacity for knowledge and her ability to tap into the bees as a release from daily life was somehow really lovely to read. The language in this is particularly beautiful, and even the linguistic histories made me think about what it really means to keep bees.

A beautiful book, covering the year of a thirty year old woman in a new place, new job, and slightly lost in her life, who decides to take up beekeeping.
I could completely relate to the narrator, who is a millennial through and through. She's moved around a lot, has friends all over the country, works incredibly hard, but she's not entirely sure what for.
While in an extremely stressful job in Oxford, she goes out into the garden and decides on the perfect spot for a bee hive and becomes fascinated by bees, She reads everything about then and the ancient art of keeping them. They become intertwined with her mental health and well-being and over the year you come with her on her journey.
This book inspired me and filled me with hope. A beautiful non-fiction short biography that focuses on the small positive things.

Tired of the city rat race that has ground her nerves and her very heart and soul into nubs, Jukes takes possession of the gift of a honeybee colony. Folklore says a gift of bees brings good luck, so Jukes decides to slow down, step back and raise her bees for a year. What follows is a lovely meditation into the world of wild, beautiful, creatures. As Jukes learns the basics of beekeeping, she also learns a lot about herself and her relationship with the natural world. I have always loved bees myself, the sight and sound of them as they go about their work, how they return after a bitter, cold winter; there seems something magical about them. While I read this book in one sitting, it would also be a lovely read to spread out, a bit every day to ground readers, relax them and help them celebrate our natural world