A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes – review

The cover of Helen Jukes’s beekeeping memoir, A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings, bears an endorsement from Helen Macdonald, the author responsible more than anyone for the resurgence of British nature writing over the past decade. Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk established something new – the use of nature as the dominant vehicle for our autopathography. The nature-cure narrative replaced the misery memoir as the principal medium through which we communicated our discontents, and it felt like the bookshops were suddenly full of books charting recoveries – whether by tending tulips or watching wolves – that stepped closely in the footsteps of Macdonald’s. Very few of them attained anything like the radiant achievement of H Is for Hawk and, reading the blurb for Jukes’s strangely titled book – a millennial takes up beekeeping to compensate for the shiftlessness of modern life and a boring desk job – I couldn’t help but experience a little sinking at the familiarity of the set-up.

It’s a feeling that Macdonald must know well – I imagine she is sent every one of these books as they appear – and it’s striking that one of the words she reaches for to praise Jukes is “unexpected”. A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings is indeed a surprising book, even an astonishing one, overcoming all those initial concerns in its luminously honest and affecting first chapter. Jukes is a gloriously gifted writer and her book ought to become a key text of this bright moment in our history of nature writing. I was reminded of William Fiennes’s The Snow Geese and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, but these resonances should not obscure the uniqueness of a book that quietly, beautifully, rewired my heart as I read it.

Jukes, closing in on 30, moves to Oxford after several years of drifting from one unengaging job to the next – “I haven’t lived anywhere longer than 18 months in the whole of my adult life.” She takes a job at a charity, but is no good at “managing things like office politics and fluorescent lightbulbs and those desk chairs with seats that spin and spin.” While in London, she’d met Luke, an urban beekeeper, and found herself obscurely drawn to the methodical rhythms of apiary. Now in Oxford, living with a friend in a rented house in a grotty corner of the city, she turns back to bees and establishes a hive in her small garden.

The brilliance of Jukes’s memoir is the way that it uses the image of the hive as a metaphor for so much else going on in the book. It’s rare to find an author who demonstrates such respect for her readers’ intelligence – the parallels and affinities are allowed to accrete gradually, subliminally, so that it’s only at the end that we recognise that a book that seemed to be about beekeeping (and we certainly learn a lot about Apis mellifera over the course of it) is actually a meditation on solitude and friendship, on urban existence, on the condition of a generation. The hive, perfectly tessellated, comes to represent for Jukes the act of writing itself, the arrangement of words into a shape that conforms as closely as possible to her particular experience of the world.

Above all, though, the hive allows Jukes to explore the idea of home. There’s an important passage in which Jukes tells us that in ancient Rome, honeybees were viewed as a class apart from other creatures, being neither entirely domestic nor fully wild – “they occupied a middle, indeterminate category all of their own”. This middle ground becomes a central conceit in the book as Jukes picks away at the question of precisely what home might mean for her in a world where property ownership is economically unviable; where concepts of home are built on nostalgic, conservative, outdated ideals; where people are more mobile, less rooted than ever before. There’s a great deal of thinking about the meaning of words in this book – Jukes’s friend Ellie works for the OED – and one of the words placed under close scrutiny is home. Jukes looks back to the original meaning of the word as “a place of sense-making, of world-building; a place from which journeys are made”. Home doesn’t have to be a single settled space, but can be a place of mind.

Finally, the book is about what close looking at, and sympathetic engagement with, the other does to us. With bees, Jukes writes, “you have to adjust your senses – to slip between habitual understandings of eyes and nose, mouth and ears; of face and body, form and formlessness – to be able to see them”. As Macdonald drew on TH White, Jukes repeatedly calls upon the work of the blind 18th-century Swiss naturalist François Huber, whose study of bees brought him a kind of sightless vision born of “intense learning and investigation”. Later, she says that her approach to beekeeping is “focused on paying attention, becoming more attuned to the world around us, perhaps even adjusting how we sense and see”. By the end, she recognises that what the bees have done for her is not permit an escape from her troubles, but rather to allow “the upwards thrust of my own hard-fought belief that something else was possible – a different kind of perception, of relation – within this less-than-perfect range”.

This realignment of the senses seems to bring about changes in how Jukes perceives her place in the world: she initially presents herself as a solitary figure and yet comes to recognise the importance of her broad cast of friends, each of whom is brought to vivid life in a few well-chosen words. She wonders about her ability to care for another, then slowly, touchingly, falls for the friend of a friend. More than anything, what Jukes conveys is that with knowledge comes affection, not just for the thing that is known, but for all life in its thrilling, intricate strangeness. It was Coleridge who said “Everyone should have two or three hives of bees;” everyone should also own A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, which moved and delighted me more than a book about insects had any right to.