Indulge your sweet tooth all year long with honey’s many seasonal flavors. Use avocado honey to add depth to April’s baby carrots; spice up your July peaches with sourwood honey; and add some cranberry honey to November’s Thanksgiving spread. This delightful book is filled with bits of honey lore and beekeeping history to sweeten your exploration of the varied and delicious ways you can use honey every day.

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.

A history of the planet's last global warming phase, which took place between the tenth and fifteenth centuries, traces how climate changes affected trading routes and population growth, bringing abundance to some regions and famines to others.

Originally published in hardcover in 2011.

Land of Milk & Honey gives an authoritative account of Irish foods through the centuries & their special associations with wakes, weddings, & the calendar feasts of the year. Included are chapters on all of the foods of Ireland with vivid accounts of their historical uses & preparations. With frequent references to literature & folklore, Bríd Mahon charts the fascinating culinary history of Ireland.

“As a world authority on insect anatomy, Snodgrass has given us this book a brilliant account of the anatomy of the honey bee and how it relates to the way that bees develop and how and why they function as they do in their interesting communal life. This book should be in the library of every student of the honey bee and bee behaviour—beekeepers as well as scientists. The book is delightfully written and is enjoyable reading.”—American Bee Journal “This is not just a technical reference book on honey bee anatomy. It is far more, it is essentially a treatise on entomology, using one species as an example, and including a discussion of the fundamentals of embryology, development, and metamorphosis as well as anatomy. The subject of each chapter is approached from the broadest evolutionary point of view, and its horizon includes all the arthropods and beyond, so that the bee really typifies animal life in general. Finally, the language of the book is such that it can be read straight through with pleasure....It is a delight to follow the author through this complete examination of one insect: how it develops, how it grows, and how it operates.”—Entomological News