A Keeper of Bees: Notes on Hive and Home

When she's talking bees, beekeeper and American studies professor Wallace rolls right along, her affection for the little buzzers quite apparent. In a chatty voice, she reflects on all things bee, from how their senses work to what the tendency to swarm is all about (to establish a new hive in response to overpopulation in the first hive) and how each bee serves the hive through various stages of life. She reveals how honey is made (spit is involved) and how the hive, itself an organism of sorts, functions. At times Wallace touches briefly, and sometimes all too glibly, on global environmental issues. Her narrative leaves traces of her personal involvement with bees, though the reader only really gains insight into her personality late in the book: In a section full of potential, she reveals that without the social link her ex-husband provided, she "could happily have holed up in the bottomland woods and gone slowly, ecstatically mad" and describes her tension with the hive of human society as a single woman in midlife. Still, Wallace leaves much unsaid, and this is as close as we get to understanding how the hive is linked to her own life. (July 11)