A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

"I think it succeeds splendidly and very surprisingly. I was very suspicious of the book when I first picked it up. I thought, oh, here is a sort of ‘Bridget Jones’ Bee Diary’. Another account of someone who is being ‘redeemed’ by the natural world, and I was prepared to be extremely cynical about it. But my cynicism soon evaporated. It’s a very poised exercise in diffidence and understatement. Jukes doesn’t know what to expect when her bees come. She’s not lusting after epiphany. She doesn’t have any expectations of the bees, or indeed of the world generally. If you come to anything with no sense of entitlement, one of the paradoxically wonderful things about the world is that you get so much more than somebody who assumes that the world owes them something. Jukes’ strenuous effort at relationality—her effort to get to know these creatures which are so very different from her—results in her being humanised and personalised. She becomes more of who she is, and therefore she’s able to give more of herself to humans. There’s a vital lesson there. The bees give Jukes her man. There are three stages in their gift. First they make her herself. Then they make her a person capable of loving. And finally, by a beautifully mysterious route, they deliver onto her doorstep her white-haired lover. She doesn’t just find herself (and thus other humans). She also finds a place—the place where she happens to live. The bees root her in the very unpromising part of the wilderness which is suburban Oxford. They give her herself, and they give her a place, and they anchor her to a place in a way which was previously inconceivable. It’s a great testament to the power of humility to move mountains. I think our efforts to relate to non-human species are all extravagant exercises in empathy, and to empathise with something very different from oneself requires a great deal more empathy than empathising with someone or something who is very closely akin to you. Empathy, like everything else, is something which gets better the more you work at it. So an attempt to relate to non-human creatures is a sort of strenuous empathy gym. Helen, being the humble person that she is, realised quite rightly that she couldn’t get at all close to bees, and she concluded, quite wrongly, that that was a reason to give up. She should have realised, I think, that the process of continuing to fail was itself really useful and fecund and exciting. Had she been prepared to battle on, knowing very little, much more would have been revealed to her. That, after all, is the main message of the book. I agree. There never was a time when nature was entirely our friend. Or if it is friend, it’s a strange friend. The natural world will eat us all one day, whether by worms, fire, or fish. That’s one reason to be suspicious of people who get too cosy with it. It makes me wonder whether the epiphanic nature writers really know nature at all or have reflected on it properly."