The Hive - Couverture souple

Richly informative and beautifully written (The Times)

A light and delicious book, in an exceptionally pretty honey-coloured jacket gilded with bees, and it is written with sparkle and charm ... some of her best writing is about the deliciousness of honey, and it is hard to read her chapter of recipes without drooling. (The Tablet)

Bee Wilson's little book is a small hive of treasure. It is a sweet celebration of our appreciation of the honeybee (Dumfries and Galloway Standard)

She manages to present a great deal of information in a form as easy to swallow as a spoonful of honey. (Tom Fort, Sunday Telegraph)

Entertaining and thoroughly worthwhile (The Sunday Times)

Wonderfully entertaining reading. (The Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society)

Can hardly be bettered. (Guardian)

A fascinating tribute to the bee (Woman & Home)

Fascinating, careful, witty and intelligent ... Almost any paragraph chosen at random is entertaining (Prue Leith, New Statesman)

Wilson presents the history of the honeybee in this engaging and anecdote-filled account (Publishing News)

A gem of a book. (The Bookseller)

Fascinating (Humphrey Carpenter, Sunday Times)

Buzzes with info and has the prettiest dust-jacket of the third millennium (Barry Humphries, Sunday Telegraph)

A charming, fascinating pot-pourri of all things beelike (Bookseller)

'Bee Wilson conveys a real sense of the relationship between bees and us, and her short, punchy chapters are witty and fascinating' (Easy Living)

Endlessly fascinating (Mail on Sunday)

Erudite, informative, accurate and a delight to read. (Times Literary Supplement)

'This is the Christmas book with a real sting.' (Saga)

'Beautifully produced and well-researched ...leaving readers to marvel'. (Good Book Guide)

This biography is immensely detailed, intelligent, generous, sympathetic, and often entertaining...Betjeman fans...will delight in Hillier's monumental work (Literary Review)

'Wilson has a fine eye for character sketches.' (The Times)

'For a moment you may feel, as I did, that part of Wilson's research for this book involved turning into a bee for a few days ... Amazing.' -- Nick Lezard (Guardian)

'There are delights and surprises on virtually every page of this gem of a book' (Sunday Telegraph)

'Wilson's sprightly hymn to the honeybee ... conveys ... the marvel, complexity and ultimate unknowability that has made the beehive such a fascination' (Independent)

'A riveting read . . .this beguiling book is more a history of ideas than an actual study . . .buzzing with fascinating facts' (BBC Gardener's World Magazine)

'Bee Wilson recounts all the weird and wonderful things people have believed about bees.' (History Today)

'Juicy reading ... worth buying for the illustration on p. 204 alone.' (The Spectator)

'Bee Wilson... connects readers' imaginations with their salivary glands.' (New Statesman)

'A brilliant examination of a natural phenomenon we all take for granted' (Sunday Express)

'Delightful' (Economist)

'Fascinating and readable. Wilson writes with flair and wit about everything from Pliny to pollination; her love of honey in all its sheer sensuousness shines through' (Scotsman)

'Fascinating and readable. Wilson writes with flair and wit about everything from Pliny to pollination; her love of honey in all its sheer sensuousness shines through' (Tom Fort, Sunday Telegraph)

'Beautifully written and absorbing' (New Statesman)

'Can hardly be bettered ... Principally a writer on food, Wilson none the less knows a lot about keeping honeybees, and also about their biology and natural history, waxworks and candles, and the changing shape of the beehive.' (The Guardian)

Ever since men first hunted for honeycomb in rocks and daubed pictures of it on cave walls, the honeybee has been seen as one of the wonders of nature: social, industrious, beautiful, terrifying. No other creature has inspired in humans an identification so passionate, persistent or fantastical.

The Hive recounts the astonishing tale of all the weird and wonderful things that humans believed about bees and their 'society' over the ages. It ranges from the honey delta of ancient Egypt to the Tupelo forests of modern Florida, taking in a cast of characters including Alexander the Great and Napoleon, Sherlock Holmes and Mohammed Ali.

The Hive is also a history of ideas, taking us through the evolution of science, religion and politics, and a social history which explores the bee's impact on food and human ritual.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Bee Wilson shows how humans will always view the hive as a miniature universe with order and purpose, and look to it to make sense of their own.