Looks at the life cycle of honeybees, their funcion, and their impact on the environment, along with information on beekeeping and the collection of honey.

Honeybees have been a part of Virginia's history since they arrived with the first European colonists. They were Jamestown's valuable addition and a Civil War soldier's sweet if painful temptation, and they served as homefront heroes when the world wars caused sugar shortages. In recent years, mead has seen a resurgence along with beekeeping and has claimed a place as a craft beverage in the Commonwealth. Join author Virginia Johnson to hunt escaped swarms flying wild in the forests, visit modern-day observation hives and follow the mead path across the Commonwealth for a taste of history.

Whether drizzled into our tea or spread atop our terms of endearment, there’s one thing that is always true about honey: it is sweet. As Lucy M. Long shows in this book, while honey is definitely the natural sweetener par excellence, it has a long history in our world as much more, serving in different settings as a food, tonic, medicine, and even preservative. It features in many religions as a sacred food of the gods. In this luscious history, she traces the uses and meanings of honey in myriad cultures throughout time. Long points to a crucial fact about honey: it can be enjoyed with very little human processing, which makes it one of the most natural foods we consume. Its nutritional qualities and flavors dramatically reflect the surroundings in which it is produced, and those who produce it—bees—are some of the most important insects in the world, the chief pollinators of wild plants and domesticated crops alike. Showing how honey has figured in politics, religion, economics, and popular culture, Long also directly explores its tastiest use—in our food and drink—offering a history of its culinary place in the world, one sweetened with an assortment of delicious recipes. Lively and engaged, her account will give even the saltiest of us an insatiable sweet tooth.

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln and Muhammad Ali both consumed bee pollen to boost energy, or that beekeepers in nineteenth-century Europe viewed their bees as part of the family? Or that after man, the honeybee, Apis mellifera, is the most studied creature on the planet? And that throughout history, honey has been highly valued by the ancient Egyptians (the first known beekeepers), the Greeks, and European monarchs, as well as Winnie the Pooh? In Sweetness and Light, Hattie Ellis leads us into the hive, revealing the fascinating story of bees and honey from the Stone Age to the present, from Nepalese honey hunters to urban hives on the rooftops of New York City. Uncovering the secrets of the honeybee one by one, Ellis shows how this small insect, with a collective significance so much greater than its individual size, can carry us through past and present to tell us more about ourselves than any other living creature.

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“Integrates history, technology, sociology, economics, and politics with this remarkable insect serving as the unifying concept” (Buffalo News). The tiny, industrious honey bee has become part of popular imagination—reflected in our art, our advertising, even our language itself with such terms as queen bee and busy as a bee. Honey bees—and the values associated with them—have influenced American culture for four centuries. Bees and beekeepers have represented order and stability throughout the changes, challenges, and expansions of a highly diverse country. Bees in America is an enlightening cultural history of bees and beekeeping in the United States. Tammy Horn, herself a beekeeper, offers a social and technological history from the colonial period, when the British first brought bees to the New World, to the present, when bees are being trained by the American military to detect bombs. Horn shows how the honey bee was one of the first symbols of colonization and how bees’ societal structures shaped our ideals about work, family, community, and leisure. This book is both a fascinating read and an “excellent example of the effects agriculture has on history” (Booklist). “A wealth of worthy material.” —Publishers Weekly

Authoritative and personal, this is an introduction to all aspects of a traditional Jewish Shabbat, providing both an inspirational call to observe this weekly holiday and a comprehensive resource.