One woman's charming and personal account of abandoning the rat race to live blissfully as a beekeeper and honey entrepreneur—plus everything you'd ever want to know about bees.
Ten years ago, Marina Marchese fell in love with bees during a tour of a neighbor's honeybee hives. Surprised to find that allowing docile honeybees to crawl across her hands instilled a serene tranquility and comfort, Marina quit her job, acquired her own bees, built her own hives, harvested honey, earned a certificate in apitherapy, studied wine tasting in order to transfer those skills to honey tasting, and eventually opened her own business. Today, Red Bee Honey sells artisanal honey and honey-related products to shops and restaurants all over the country.
Honeybee is not only a warm and inspiring story of one woman's intimate experience with honeybees (arguably the most industrious creatures on earth) but it is also bursting with fascinating and practical information about all aspects of bees, beekeeping, and honey, including life inside the beehive and the role of the queen, drones, and workers; how bees make honey; pollination and its importance in sustaining life; building a beehive; hiving and keeping honeybees; harvesting honey and comb; healing with honey and the practice of apitherapy; and much, much more. Recipes for food, drink, and personal care products are included throughout. Also included is a detailed appendix of 75 different varieties of honey.
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C. Marina Marchese is the founder and owner of Red Bee Honey, which sells honey and natural products to gourmet food shops and fine restaurants all over the United States. (www.redbee.com) Certified by the American Apitherapy Society, she has trained as a honey judge at the University of Georgia and serves on the board of the Back Yard Beekeepers Association of Connecticut. Marina has written for Bee Culture magazine and The Journal of AmericanApitherapy Society, and Red Bee Honey was the cover story of the American Bee Journal in 2004. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, she is also an award-winning illustrator and designer. Marina lives and tends bees in Weston, Connecticut.
Product Details
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers; First Edition edition (September 1, 2009)
Marina Marchese is changing the way people taste and think about honey. This entrepreneur is a beekeeper, an author, a honey sommelier and the visionary behind Red Bee ® Artisanal Honey. During a former career as an international designer, Marina unexpectedly visited a neighbor's apiary where her first taste of fresh honey from the beehive would change the course of her life. She quit her job, built a beehive and acquired some Italian honeybees to become a beekeeper. It was on a visit to Montalcino, Italy the City of Honey, that Marina became passionate about single-origin honeys. Compelled by the philosophy of terroir and the diverse flavor profiles of honey determined by the type of nectar gathered by the honeybees, Marina launched a revolutionary collection of single-origin honeys under the Red Bee Brand. Today, Marina sells her Red Bee ® luxury honey to celebrity chefs, Relais & Chateaux restaurants, fine cheese and artisan food shops all over the country. Marina is the founder of The American Honey Tasting Society, to protect the quality and character of this noble food and educate through her signature Honey Tasting Laboratory Workshops at venues like Mario Batali's Eataly, The Food Network, The Four Seasons Restaurant, Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, Murray's Cheese Shop, Artisanal Premium Cheese Center and The United Nations. Marina's Red Bee Honey was honored with a Snail of Approval from Slow Food Metro North. Marina's Red Bee Apiary has been featured on ABC-TV's The Chew and profiled in Williams Sonoma's Meet the Maker.
The Honey Connoisseur: Selecting, Tasting, and Pairing Honey, With a Guide to More Than 30 Varietals
From honey experts C. Marina Marchese and Kim Flottum comes this comprehensive introduction to the origin, flavor, and culinary uses of more than 30 varietals of honey, from ubiquitous clover to tangy star thistle to rich, smoky buckwheat
Like wine, cheese, coffee, and chocolate, honey has emerged as an artisanal obsession. Its popularity at farmers' markets and specialty food stores has soared as retailers are capitalizing on the trend. The Honey Connoisseur teaches consumers everything they need to know about how to taste, select, and use a diverse selection of honey.
After a brief explanation of how bees produce honey, the authors introduce the concept of terroir, the notion that soil, weather, and other natural phenomena can affect the taste of honey. As with wines, knowing the terroir of a honey varietal helps to inform an understanding of its flavor.
The book goes on to give a thorough course in the origins of more than 30 different honeys as well as step-by-step instructions, how to taste honey, describe its flavor and determine what other flavors pair best with a particular honey. Also included are simple recipes such as dressings, marinades, quick-and-easy desserts, and beverages.
Beautifully illustrated and designed, The Honey Connoisseur is the perfect book for foodies and locavores alike.
HONEYBEE Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper
From urban farms to the White House, beekeeping is a trend that seems to be here to stay. Beekeeping pioneer C. Marina Marchese's inspiring story of one woman's transformative relationship with honeybees--an experience that changed her life as well as her perception of the natu¬ral world and her role in it--is back in paperback and bursting with information about all aspects of honeybees, beekeeping, and honey. From life inside the beehive, to the role of the queen, workers, and drones; from pollination and its importance in sustaining life to the culinary pleasures of honey; and from hiving and keeping honeybees to the ancient and venerable practice of apitherapy, or healing with honey, pollen, and bee venom. In addition, recipes for food and personal care prod¬ucts are sprinkled throughout, supplemented by a detailed appendix of 75 different varieties of honey (including food and wine pairings for each). Written in a warm and confident voice and illustrated with charming drawings, Honeybee shows that taking a chance and pursuing your deepest desires really can lead to a more fulfilling life and a successful new career. It is also an irresist¬ible look at one of the most delicious and natural sweeteners in the world and the industrious creatures that create "liquid gold" as Marina calls it.
Marina Marchese puts honey on everything. Buttery blueberry honey on her yogurt and mapley knotweed honey on her waffles and pancakes. North Carolina sourwood honeycomb on her toast and butter chestnut honey on her Gorgonzola. She likes gallberry honey on her fried chicken and lavender honey in her salad dressings. She cooks her food extra plan to make a neutral canvas. "I don't season; I drizzle." Excerpt from American Terrior By Rowan Jacobson
Referred to as "The Red Queen" by author Rowan Jacobsen, Marina has concentrated her talents to stimulate the palate with delicious wine, cheese and honey pairings that will dazzle readers/listeners. From Red Bee presence on the shelves of the famous Murray's Cheese Shop in New York City, to quaint honey tastings at Marina's cottage in Connecticut, Marina is an unparalleled connoisseur of honey from all over the world.
"Ms. Marchese has given us a lovely gift. Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper is an entertaining and useful primer for the novice and honeybee devotee alike." -The Washington Times
"Honeybee is a delightful book, filled with love and passion and fascinating information about one of the most important (and neglected) links in the food production chain: bees! Highly recommended!" --Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS, author of The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth * * * "A delightful read, packed with useful information and charming stories, Honeybee will tell you everything you need to know to get started in beekeeping. More important, it will make you want to: Marina Marchese's enthusiasm is infectious." --Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis * * * "Honeybee brings a greater appreciation of both [honey] and the little creatures that deliver it. A simple food turns out not to be so simple after all; as I am to honey itself, I found myself a little stuck to this book." --Max McCalman, Dean of Curriculum, Artisanal Premium Cheese, and author of The Cheese Plate, Cheese: A Connoisseur's Guide to the World's Best, and Mastering Cheese * * * "C. Marina Marchese's deeply felt love and appreciation for the honeybee, the ancient craft of beekeeping, and the exquisite delicacy known as honey leaps from these pages. From her backyard in Connecticut to the Amalfi coast of Italy her personal journey provides a wonderful introduction to the world of the honeybee." --Ross Conrad, author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture * * * "Marina Marchese's Honeybee: Lesson from an Accidental Beekeeper is a charming and informative passage to the hive from the beginning to end.... Especially helpful are the appendices to guide novice and experienced beekeepers in honey varietals, pairings, and labels. It's a perfect bee primer for all audiences." --Tammy Horn, author of Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation
Review: "Nine years ago, from her home in Connecticut, Marchese, then a creative director for a giftware company, became a beekeeper and honey entrepreneur. In this engaging, delightfully informative work, she recounts how visits to the apiaries of the neighboring community's Back Yard Beekeepers overcame her initial trepidation of bees as she learned about the industry and craftsmanship of these insects and became bowled over by the taste of fresh honey. Step by step she explains how she got started as a beekeeper, from studying bee anatomy and hive organization, to ordering equipment online such as her Langstroth hive, a smoker (to calm the bees while working) and protective clothing. She had to learn to 'pour' her three pounds of live Italian honeybees into the hive (the first time she got stung six times), while carefully introducing the all-powerful queen. Marchese is fascinated by the marvels of bee behavior -- pollen foraging, dances, swarming -- and imparts as well a goodly bit of bee history. She offers plenty of her own honey-beeswax concoctions, both edible and cosmetic, with excellent appendixes on the varietals of honey. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
I enjoyed this book very much! Have read it twice so far, and sure to read it over again many more times as the years go by! It's nice to read a book on a fellow beekeepers experiences instead of the usual instructional type books. There are many of them out there, and I seem to be collecting them all, but books of this nature are a much more enjoyable read to me! A very nice job by the author!
I have to agree with the other one star review that this book is poorly written, inaccurate, and filled with numerous typographical errors. The book is also disorganized and, at many times, the book reads less like a tome written by someone with first-hand experience and more like a high school research paper in which the source of all of the information is Wikipedia.
For those expecting an accurate, informative account of honeybees and beekeeping, it appears that there may be other resources out there (admittedly, I am not an expert in this area). For those expecting to read a humbling - or perhaps even humorous - account of a NYC jet-setter trying out a career at the polar opposite end of her then career this is not the book you are looking for.
Finally, while not necessarily related to the book, I was extremely disappointed to learn that the majority of all of Red Bee's honey is not locally harvested from Marchese's own hives but rather is collected and marketed under the Red Bee name.
A lovely story that makes you feel one with the bees. I can recommend it to anyone and bet it will change their understanding of the contibution bees make in our lives. Dorothy
