Bees in America
How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The honeybee isn't native to the U.S., but it's hard to imagine the country without it. Like cattle, another imported species, the honeybee helped transform what European settlers saw as a vast wilderness into a land of milk and honey. First-time author Horn, who learned beekeeping from her grandfather, provides a wealth of worthy material about bees in America, from the use of the hive metaphor to justify colonization in the 1500s and 1600s, to bees' role in pollinating the prairies and orchards that we now take for granted. She discusses the attitudes of native peoples toward the insects; the beekeeping practices of African Americans, women and new immigrants; advances in beekeeping technology; the role of honey and beeswax in the U.S. economy; and the use of bee imagery in the arts. While Horn's affection for her subject is always evident, her efforts to tie beekeeping to every aspect of American life are sometimes strained as when she writes that "because major social rifts were threatening to tear apart the 'good life,' this country's arts environment used the honey bee to negotiate difficult power struggles between races, between spouses, between political parties, between generations, between legal rulings." Horn's thesis is better served without such overreaching and unconvincing claims. B&w illus.
