Honey and Venom
Confessions of an Urban Beekeeper
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A year in the life of New York City’s premier beekeeper, who chronicles his adventures and the quirky personalities he encounters while spreading his infinite knowledge of and passion for the remarkable honey bee
“Coté’s charming and poignant essay collection delivers the entertainment and smarts required to make real change in how we look at our planet, and ourselves.”—Andrew Zimmern
From the humble drone to the fittingly named worker to the queen herself—who is more a slave than a monarch—the hive world, Andrew Coté reveals, is full of strivers and slackers, givers and takers, and even some insect promiscuity (startlingly similar to the prickly human variety). Written with Coté’s trademark humor, acumen, and a healthy dose of charm, Honey and Venom illuminates the obscure culture of New York City “beeks” and the biology of the bees themselves for both casual readers and bee enthusiasts.
Coté takes readers with him on his daily apiary adventures over the course of a year, in the city and across the globe. In Manhattan, among his many duties, he is called to capture swarms that have clustered on fire hydrants, air-conditioning units, or street-vendor umbrellas. Beyond maneuvering within a metropolitan populace as frenzied as the bees’, Coté is able to escape from the hive mind and the rigors of city dwelling with his philanthropic, international approach to apiculture. Annually, he travels to regions across the world with his organization, Bees Without Borders, where he teaches beekeepers how to increase their honey yield and income via beekeeping endeavors. For Coté, a fourth-generation beekeeper, this is a family tradition, and this personal significance pervades his celebration of the romance and mystery of bees, their honey, and the beekeepers whose lives revolve around these most magical creatures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this delightful debut, New York City beekeeper Cot recounts a year of raising bees and the big adventures these tiny insects have brought to his life. In his 20s with a cushy professorship, Cot chucked it all to turn his honey-making hobby into his career. Following in the footsteps of his Quebecois father, a firefighter turned professional beekeeper, Cot becomes an expert apiarist in the Big Apple, placing and tending to bees all over the five boroughs and helping to get beekeeping legalized in New York City. Along the way, he starts Bees Without Borders, a nonprofit that promotes beekeeping in third world countries; helps create a bee sculpture for MoMA; works with the NYPD to capture swarms of bees; and travels to Iraq where he talks with religious Iraqi residents who take exception to the fact that a queen bee "copulates with many drones." Throughout, he writes sweetly about the life cycle of the honey bee and praises his father, who "holds more information about bees in one hair of his white moustache than I will ever know." Honey farmers and urban naturalists will be buzzing about this one.
