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Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee

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Jonathan Swift, in _The Battle of the Books_, wrote about bees that they had filled their hives with honey and wax, "... thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light." The quote is the epigram for Hattie Ellis's book, Sweetness & Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee (Harmony Books). The book is partly a travelogue, as she visits different continents and describes their particular honeys, and a partly a review of bee literature, as well as an account of biology and natural history affecting human history. It is thus a wide-ranging tale, but anyone reading it will understand that bees and humans have had an intimate connection that surpasses in complexity any other we have made to domesticated animals.

Ellis's book begins with the evolution of the bee; the oldest known bee was found in New Jersey, preserved in amber from around a hundred million years ago. Cave paintings going back some 8,000 years show honey-hunters, climbing trees with ancient vessels to bring back sweet treasure. When humans left hunter-gathering and settled on agriculture, they also made pots and baskets; probably some bees took advantage of such containers for their hives, and thus the venerable partnership was born. The Egyptians were the first farmers to keep bees, and many of their practices from over 4,000 years ago are still used by beekeepers. Honeybees are part of the old world, not native elsewhere, but they have been carried all over the world. Transporting them was difficult, for they would be two months at sea to reach America, or six months to Australia. Among the most interesting of chapters here is the one having to do with urban bees and beekeepers. Urban honey has its advantages, among which are that the bees forage on a varied horticultural diet, the flowers of which are untouched by pesticides and chemicals of agriculture. Ellis interviews a beekeeper who has seventeen hives on rooftops in New York, and shuttles by subway to tend them. He got the use of the rooftops by advertising, and giving a percentage of the honey to the owners of the buildings.

Ellis tells over and over incidents that recount a particular closeness to our one domesticated insect. There is folklore devoted to bees that has no equivalent in, say, the raising of cattle. Bees were often thought of as part of the family, and "telling the bees" is an ancient, and still current, ritual to keep them in the family circle. Family news, like an upcoming wedding, is whispered to a hive, and some wedding cake eventually left for the bees to consume. The bees certainly had to be told of deaths, and perhaps a bit of food from the obsequies left for them. If the beekeeper died, the hives, perhaps with black crepe on them, were turned away from the procession. Such traditions make a modicum of sense; if a beekeeper dies, the intimate connection between keeper and bees is broken, and the importance of a connection to the new keeper is reinforced. One beekeeper after another relates that not only is there a particular affection for one's hives, the bees can sense the keeper's emotional state. Bad language and quarreling, the legend goes, offend the bees and cause the moral insects to deliver a reproof by stinging; but keepers do say that to work with bees, you need to have a patience and be in a good mood. One keeper says, "Whatever tension or anger you have from the rest of the world, you just have to let go." It is one of the pleasant lessons bees have for us, and Ellis has written a book full of similar sweet stories and enlightening facts.

It's amazing to receive two books on honey and honeybees virtually simultaneously from different publishers, but that's how the publishing world goes, and Sweetness And Light is one of the two, following the stories of bees and honey from ancient to modern times. Hattie Ellis' history blends social issues, science, travel and nature insights, and comes from a columnist who specializes in writing about food. Lively anecdotes follow the history, especially the individuals involved in pioneering discoveries in the field. A 'must' for honey historians.

I was enchanted by this book. Artfully written, it gives you a real sense of the history of the honey bee and of the people who cultivated it. Hattie Ellis incorporates a great diversity of viewpoints and imparts her love of the myriad flavors of honey, honey products and the foods they grew up with.

As an organic gardener, I am concerned with the health of the soil and the beneficial insects who pollinate crops and keep pests in check. "Colony Collapse Disorder", the mysterious die-off of honeybee hive populations, has been in the news for the past few years. Who are these insects and how did they come to be so important? Hattie Ellis' "Sweetness & Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee" promises to answer that question but does so only imperfectly.

She starts out well enough, tracing first the evolutionary history of the honeybee, and then its relationship to humans. I was surprised to learn that in those same caves with the prehistoric paintings of bison and horses, are prehistoric paintings of honeybees and the collection of wild honey. She goes on to describe the most recent speculations as to how honeybees moved from the wild to become part of the domestic landscape, the use of honey in ancient cuisines and then traces the historical arc of beekeeping from ancient times to modern day, including the introduction of the honeybee to North America by European colonists.

My problem with this wealth of information is Ms. Ellis' Eurocentric focus. She might better have subtitled her book "The Mysterious History of the Honeybee in Europe, North America and New Zealand", New Zealand having once been a British colony (Ms. Ellis is British). Other than a brief mention of Brazil in connection with killer bees and the Himalayas to illustrate her point that honeybees can withstand cold environments, she offers us no information on honeybees or beekeeping in Africa, Asia or South America.

I find it difficult to believe that Europeans were the only peoples to keep honeybees. Didn't the Chinese invent just about everything? Why not beekeeping? And if wild honey is collected in the Himalayas by Nepalese, doesn't it stand to reason that the more sophisticated civilizations on the Indian sub-continent would also have had a relationship of some kind with honey and honeybees?

"Sweetness & Light" is an excellent, but limited, history of honey and honeybees. It left me hungry for more information on these fascinating creatures and their relationships with their environment and humans.

I find honeybees fascinating, and when I went to find a book, this was the first thing in my search. It was a great find. The book has a lot of information, but also it isn't dull to read like some books. The information is spliced in with her personal experiences and descriptions of various types of honey. Plus, the woman writes beautifully. Her writing style is romantic and concise, presumably because she is a food writer. But if you are at all interested in bees or honey, I highly recommend it. If you are someone who already knows a lot about the science behind bees, most of the basic information you may already know, but perhaps not the history of the hive, old traditions with bees, or the way honey is classified the world over. And there is an amazing section on how the Africanized bees came to this country and how things went awry. It was an absolutely delightful book to read, and I was sad when I came to the last pages, Ellis pulled me into the world of bees and honey, and I was truly attached to some of the people she had met in her journey to do research for the book. It truly was a joy in every way that a book should be.

This book had such a good price , I had to get it. We love bees at my house and this book presented many interesting facts in a format that was sometimes humorous, and often fascinating. A good read.

_Sweetness and Light_ by Hattie Ellis is a wonderful and enjoyable tour of the natural and human history of the honeybee.

The prologue showed Ellis tagging along with beekeepers harvesting honey from bees in the heather moors of England. I learned several things, such as that bees burrow in search of bare skin when they seek to defend a nest (important to make sure there is a not single stray stitch on a beekeeper's outfit), bees produce a banana-like odor in the air when they sting (attracting other bees), and that the quality and flavor of English honey has varied over time as changing agricultural practices and land uses have altered the types of flowers bees have available to visit.

The first chapter looked at basics of bee biology. Topics addressed include the division of labor in hives between forager bees and house bees and the roles and habits of drones and queens, how nectar is actually gathered and how it is transformed into honey, an introduction to some of the exotic types of honey in the world (both monofloral honeys produced from one flower, such as tree-of-heaven honey and mango honey, and multifloral honeys, produced from nectar gathered from multiple species, such as what may be found in an alpine meadow), the evolution of bees, and the tremendous variety of bees in the world (there are 22,000 species in the world, found from the tropics to the Arctic and from the Himalayas to sea level, a group that includes such odd family members as miner bees - one Brazilian species digs up to 16 feet down - and leaf-cutter bees and nine species of _Apis_, the honeybee, with the two most important in terms of honey production being the eastern honeybee, _Apis cerana_ and _Apis mellifera_, the "most successful bee of all time," the "superbee of planet earth").

The second chapter looked at wild honey gathering, both in the natural world (gorillas, chimpanzees, and bears all love honey) and with early man. Ellis looked at reasons why man might have first started to raid bees for not only their honey but also to eat their larva, ancient cave art depicting honey hunting, and how traditional societies such as the San or bushmen and the Mbuti pygmies gather honey.

The third chapter looked at beekeeping in ancient Egypt, which was surprisingly sophisticated early on with the Egyptians having constructed dried mud hives for their bees and may have practiced migratory beekeeping, keeping hives on boats in the Nile, following the crops that were currently in bloom.

Chapter four looked at the honeybee in ancient Greece and Rome, how bees were viewed in mythology, the writings of Virgil, Aristotle, and Varro on them (Varro in particular wrote of the medicinal properties of propolis or "bee-glue", a sticky dark substance that bees use to seal up their hives), and the advent of cire perdue or the "lost wax" method of casting statues which made use of malleable beeswax.

Chapter five looked at bees in medieval Europe, including the methods (and feudal legalities) of gathering wild honey, the advent of the skep, the domed straw hive that became a major symbol of traditional beekeeping, often placed in bee boles (a sheltered recess in a house or garden wall), the anguish caused by many because of the fact for centuries to come in order to harvest honey one had to kill the hive, the world of mead production and consumption, and the often greater role bees played not in producing honey but in producing beeswax for candles.

Chapter six looked at the foundations of modern science as it was applied to the world of honeybees, including the use of observation hives, microscopes, the first detailed anatomical studies of bees, and the first attempts to solve the problem of collecting honey without killing bees (primitive versions of the wooden box "supers" used by beekeepers today). Also the importance of the honeybee as a political symbol was examined as well.

Chapter seven examined the spread of bees by Europeans to the North America, Australia, and New Zealand, new methods developed by the colonists to track down wild honey supplies, and even the important symbolism of the honeybee to the Mormons.

The eight chapter looked at folklore about bees, including such charming traditions as that hives must be traded or bartered for, never bought and the old country tradition of "telling the bees" and later 19th and 20th century advances in bee science, particularly of one Lorenzo Langstroth (the "father of modern beekeeping") who built the prototype of the modern beekeeper's hive when he discovered the concept of bee space, the amount of room that could be left open around bee combs to allow bees to move, combs to be easily extracted, but not so large as to lead bees to instinctively fill in. The author also discussed other bee-related inventions and the start of mass production of honey, with John Harbison, "the Bee King of California," leading the way.

Chapter nine looked at the bee and the hive in art and architecture.

The tenth chapter looked at many fascinating topics in modern bee science, such as genetic research on bees (particularly the contributions of the beekeeping monk known as Brother Adam), studies on how bees communicate to one another, how they see the world, and the truth about the dreaded "killer bees."

Chapter eleven looked at the role of various bee products in traditional and modern medicine, including not only honey (including rather odd tasting honeys that are made from certain plants) but pollen, royal jelly (highly labor intensive to collect, miniscule amounts are produced to feed all bees for the first three days of their lives and queens for the rest of their lives), and bee venom (which can now be commercially collected without killing the bee).

The final chapter looked at urban beekeeping in major cities, the threats that bees face today, and what this means for agriculture.

This beautifully written book allows the pleasurable ingestion of numerous curious and intriging facts by coating them with honey. I have never enjoyed a non-fiction book as much!