I love the cover on this book, which drew me right in. It is the quiet story of a woman in her journey to owning bees. She had learned to work with them years previously but never had any of her own due to moving so much. It is not fast paced but a lovely memoir about the art of beekeeping and all that goes into it. Thank you to Netgalley for this free ebook in exchange for an honest review.

A unique memoir ba fascinating look at the authors life and her adventure as a bee keeper,Interesting informative I really enjoyed her story.#netgalley#knopfdoubleday

SYNOPSIS: An inspiring, up-close portrait of tending to a honeybee hive—a year of living dangerously—watching and capturing the wondrous, complex universe of honeybees and learning an altogether different way of being in the world.

"As strange, beautiful, and unexpected, as precise and exquisite in its movings as bees in a hive. I loved it."--Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as the author is entering her thirties and feeling disconnected in her life. Uneasy about her future and struggling to settle into her new house in Oxford with its own small garden, she is brought back to a time of accompanying a friend in London—a beekeeper—on his hive visits. And as a gesture of good fortune for her new life, she is given a colony of honeybees. According to folklore, a colony, freely given, brings good luck, and Helen Jules embarks on a rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper.

Jukes writes about what it means to “keep” wild creatures; on how to live alongside beings whose laws and logic are so different from our own . . . She delves into the history of beekeeping and writes about discovering the ancient, haunting, sometimes disturbing relationship between keeper and bee, human and wild thing.

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is a book of observation, of the irrepressible wildness of these fascinating creatures, of the ways they seem to evade our categories each time we attempt to define them. Are they wild or domestic? Individual or collective? Is honey an animal product or is it plant-based? As the author’s colony grows, the questions that have, at first compelled her interest to fade away, and the inbetweenness, the unsettledness of honeybees call for a different kind of questioning, of consideration.

A subtle yet urgent mediation on uncertainty and hope, on solitude and friendship, on feelings of restlessness and on home; on how we might better know ourselves. A book that shows us how to be alert to the large and small creatures that flit between and among us and that urge us to learn from this vital force so necessary to be continuation of life on planet Earth.

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, but I really enjoyed this book. It is written in a way that keeps the reader interested and makes for a quick read. I found it particularly intestine as I have always dreamt of keeping bees but as of now, I have not embarked on that adventure.

This is such a lovely book. It's not at all what I usually read, and that's part of what made it so perfect. At one point, the author talks about beekeeping as a soothing contrast to the stress of her professional life, and I resonated with that feeling - this book was an interesting, relaxing diversion in the midst of the stress of quarantine. I enjoyed the interludes about the history and science of beekeeping, and thought the author did a great job of weaving information into the flow of the story. And her observations about how bee behavior made her see new aspects of human behavior are interesting. If you enjoy memoirs about people trying something new and unusual to add some contrast to their daily lives, this will be a great book for you.

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really loved this book. Disclaimer: I’m a huge fan of memoirs, books about anything nature/animals, etc. This memoir is right up my wheelhouse. I found the writing easy to read and the history and scientific detail about bees fascinating. As is a common theme in these types of books, the author Jukes’ life changes and draws parallels to bees/ a hive. Loved it.

This is a book that entertains and it's full of food for thought.
I appreciated the pace and how the author tells her story and talk about beekeeping.
Even if I know some beekeepers I learned a lot and reflected on what the author wrote.
It was an enjoyable and engrossing book that I liked.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

The author Helen Jukes who lives across the pond in England who has started a new job that she is struggling with wishing she could deal with the drama in the office and she is also adapting to her new living arrangements having just moved in with a friend . While she is wondering around the garden area comes back to a fleeting thought as to this spot would be a good place for a bee hive.

She goes back a few years to a friend that introduces her to beekeeping and the wonders of bees. This guy has beehives all around London. With this new hive it just might bring a little release form the daily work and life struggles. In my opinion the first quarter of the book it is a little tedious with all the worries she expresses about getting the hive and whether she will have success with it. She does a lot of homework in preparation things light researching the right structure and types of environment. There is a lot of history about beekeeping going back to Aristotle and some that are considered the fathers of beekeeping people like Francois Huber and Lorenzo Langstroth along with people form local apiarists group. I have read a few books on bee's so far and this one kept my interest to see how it would turn out for the author. It will keep your interest also give it a read and I am sure you will like it. If I could I would rate this between 3.5 and 3.75 . I received an ARC from Netgalley and Pantheon Books for a fair and honest review.

Helen Jukes is caught up in the grind of an office job and feeling disconnected though she lives in a busy city. She needs a change that will fill her time and create some sort of connection. Her search for meaning leads her to beekeeping. First, it’s just an idea and a bit of reading. Then, her friends gift her a honeybee colony for Christmas. Jukes spends the winter preparing for her colony, considering the history and practice of beekeeping, and ultimately what her role is in their care.

Beekeeping has always fascinated me and I actually started an online course a few weeks ago to learn more. It was serendipitous that I found this book on NetGalley and I was excited to dive in! I really enjoyed this memoir about the year in the life of a beekeeper. Jukes covers the complex inner workings of a hive and gives us the history of beekeeping without being too dry. She manages to merge her personal experiences with her research and make this an enlightening read.

This is a book that I recommend to readers who are interested in beekeeping and/or memoir with a focus on nature/environment.

Thanks to Pantheon and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is scheduled for release on May 5, 2020.

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is a retrospective and philosophical musing over the author's year as a novice beekeeper. Originally published in 2018, this American edition is due out 5th May 2020 from Knopf Doubleday on their Pantheon imprint, it's 256 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.

I'm fond of natural philosophy and I'm a beekeeper and (fanatical) gardener. I was excited to find this book and really enjoyed reading it. It has garnered numerous comparisons to H is for Hawk, which is maybe somewhat apt in that they're both introspective memoirs by British women with more than a little life examination and personal philosophy included, but where MacDonald is dour and fierce in voice, Jukes is more gentle, humorous, bewildered, and full of ennui. I found a much more apt comparison with Sue Hubbell's work.

Either way, I found this a worthwhile and relaxing read. There's no distinct narrative arc or distinctly promoted message. There is introspection and historical comparison against the cycle of seasons and lives, human and insect.

Beautifully and lyrically written. Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Helen Jukes is feeling disconnected and stuck in the day-to-day of a monotonous job- something needs to give. In an effort to make her new home and garden more lively, as well as to bring some purpose back into her life, Helen decides to start beekeeping. This book is a biography of Helen Jukes' year of beekeeping, but also ends up being fairly educational to the reader on the subject of beekeeping.

The concept behind this book had me intrigued, and I still think this is an incredibly interesting story to write. The opening imagery of the garden was well-written and I liked how she described the impulsivity of deciding to get her own bees to liven up the place after learning how to care for them occasionally from a friend of a friend who keeps bees. I also found that I liked the idea that in this work life that she's struggling to find herself in, where she's killing plants on her desk and her coworker comments on the "madness" of the idea of her keeping bees, that she is motivated to do it and embark on this journey regardless.

What I didn't like was that after just a few chapters I found this book to drag. The idea, while amazing, doesn't itself provide a lot of substance for a reader to engage with unless there is enough subplot going on to keep the reader entertained. I understand this is obviously non-fiction, but when this feels mostly educational/informational it's harder to stay interested the entire way through.

I really did love this entire idea, that this woman who is unfulfilled did something productive and good, and it was for her own happiness. I wanted to love this more than I did just for that.

Thank you to Helen Jukes, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, and Netgalley for giving me this DRC in exchange for an honest review.

“The hive has become a counterweight to a work environment I’ve been finding stressful. I’ve begun to relax out here; to drop some rigid outer casings that were holding me stiffly and rather unhappily in place. The bees are hot and busy inside the hive, and maybe if I can understand them better I might learn something important about how to live.”

A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings is a memoir by British writer, beekeeper and tutor, Helen Jukes. Now in Oxford with a new job, Helen Jukes decides she may want to keep bees. As it’s November, she won’t be able to get her own colony until the spring, so she fills the time learning all she can about them: ancient and more recent history, hives, habits. As she does her research she is “becoming less and less convinced that it’s possible to be a purely rational and detached observer of the natural world – or if that’s all we’d want to go on, if it were.”

“All of the movements and change of the last few years - the string of houses and jobs, the roving friendships – has put me in the habit of expecting things to disappear quickly once found, and in that state of almost permanent temporariness I’ve caught myself wondering a few times if it’s very reasonable to hope to keep anything at all. No wonder the arrival of a colony of bees is triggering my anxieties. Here I am pondering impermanence, having just tasked myself with the responsibility of keeping something – with sustaining it. A colony is not a book or an archivable object and you can’t hold it in a glass cabinet or on a shelf. It is live and shifting and if this one doesn’t take to our little rectangular space it’ll be put of here faster than you can say swarm.”

The pace is sedate: there’s no major action and the bees don’t even turn up until March. But it’s interesting and, surprisingly, quite moving at times, and Jukes makes many insightful observations about life, about the world we live in and our attitude to it. The prose is often beautiful and with the perilous state of bees in today’s world, it’s a timely read. An outstanding debut.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday