Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper

by C. Marina Marchese

Overview

Marina Marchese's inspirational and practical story of learning to raise honeybees and creating a life she loves.

"[An] engaging, delightfully informative work." - Publishers Weekly

"Marchese has given us a lovely gift. Honeybee is an entertaining and useful primer for the novice and honeybee devotee alike." - Washington Times

"Surpassing the predictable "how I changed careers" memoir of finding the good life, Marchese's informative guide is packed with facts about everything from pollination to harvesting, life cycles to historical lore, nutritional benefits to gourmet flavor combinations, medical applications to unusual varieties." - Booklist

Marina Marchese fell in love with bees during a tour of a neighbor's honeybee hives. She quit her job, acquired her own bees, built her own hives, harvested honey, earned a certificate in apitherapy, studied wine tasting in order to transfer those skills to honey tasting, and eventually opened her own honey business. Today, Red Bee® Honey sells artisanal honey and honey-related products to shops and restaurants all over the country.

More than an inspiring story of one woman's transformative relationship with honeybees (some of nature's most fascinating creatures), Honeybee is also bursting with information about all aspects of bees, beekeeping, and honey-including life inside the hive; the role of the queen, workers, and drones; pollination and its importance to sustaining all life; the culinary pleasures of honey; hiving and keeping honeybees; the ancient practice of apitherapy, or healing with honey, pollen, and bee venom; and much more.

Recipes for food and personal care products appear throughout. Also included is an excellent, one-of-a-kind appendix that lists 75 different honey varietals, with information on provenance, tasting notes, and food-and-wine pairings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781579128739
Publisher:	Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	03/02/2011
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	438,788
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

C. Marina Marchese is the founder and owner of Red Bee Honey, which sells honey and natural products to gourmet food shops and fine restaurants all over the United States. (www.redbee.com)  Certified by the American Apitherapy Society, she has trained as a honey judge at the University of Georgia and serves on the board of the Back Yard Beekeepers Association of Connecticut.  Marina has written for Bee Culture magazine and The Journal of AmericanApitherapy Society, and Red Bee Honey was the cover story of the American Bee Journal in 2004.  A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, she is also an award-winning illustrator and designer.  Marina lives and tends bees in Weston, Connecticut.    

Editorial Reviews

Nine years ago, from her home in Connecticut, Marchese, then a creative director for a giftware company, became a beekeeper and honey entrepreneur. In this engaging, delightfully informative work, she recounts how visits to the apiaries of the neighboring community's Back Yard Beekeepers overcame her initial trepidation of bees as she learned about the industry and craftsmanship of these insects and became bowled over by the taste of fresh honey. Step by step she explains how she got started as a beekeeper, from studying bee anatomy and hive organization, to ordering equipment online such as her Langstroth hive, a smoker (to calm the bees while working) and protective clothing. She had to learn to “pour“ her three pounds of live Italian honeybees into the hive (the first time she got stung six times), while carefully introducing the all-powerful queen. Marchese is fascinated by the marvels of bee behavior—pollen foraging, dances, swarming—and imparts as well a goodly bit of bee history. She offers plenty of her own honey-beeswax concoctions, both edible and cosmetic, with excellent appendixes on the varietals of honey. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly