1. Bees of the Ancestors, or Prehistoric Honey Hunters and Bee Shamans
2. Daughters of the Sun, or the Bees and Beekeepers of Ancient Egypt
3. Bees and Canaan, "the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey"
4. The Bee Film Festival
5. The Mysterious Beehive Stones
6. Hungarian Beekeepers, or Bees and the Hungarian Language
7. The Apiary, from Dániel Berzsenyi to Bela Hamvas
8. Bees and the Wizard Beekeeper, or Why "Beekeeping is the Poetry of Agriculture"
9. Bees and Death, or What to Tell the Bees
10. Aristotle and the Observation of Bees
11. Bees and Souls, or from Sylvia Plath's Bees to Beekeeping Healing the World
12. Bees and Outer Space, or Will There be "Space Bees"?
13. Music of the Bees
14. Bees and Man
15. Bees and Sherlock Holmes, or the "Detective" Beekeeper
16. Bees and Visual Arts, or A Guide to Coexistence
17. The Healing Power of Bees, or the Meaning and Purpose of Bees and Bee Products
18. Bees and the Poet

Reviewed by Mary Montaut An Beachaire June 2026

Tibor Weiner Sennyey is a Hungarian poet and beekeeper, and this collection of essays, although they generally include the topic of beekeeping, include so many other topics that it would be misleading to call this a book on beekeeping. Clearly the poet does not try to instruct a reader on the beekeeper's craft, though he mentions many aspects of the beekeeper's work throughout the year. However, these observations are always mixed with mediations on Hungarian history, or the environment more generally, or current debates within beekeeping, etc. The reader he perhaps imagines would be a hobby beekeeper who has a wide-ranging cultural interest and love of history. Having said this, I should add that it is a charming read, as the poet in Sennyey is a good raconteur with a relaxed and friendly style, at times positively lyrical. It is always difficult to assess such qualities in translation; there are some mistakes (even occasionally impossible for me to guess, such as "tackable beehives" on p115) but I believe that Hungarian is a difficult language to translate into English. I welcome the input from a very different beekeeping tradition. Firstly, it is most interesting to learn about the spiritual connections which Sennyey perceives in Hungarian bee culture. The last lines of the book, quoting his own poem to Anton Janša The Wandering Beekeeper' state:

Hibernating with our bees,
dreaming alertly, then, we must
understand the starry sky,
And so embrace our god.

I feel this quotation accurately reflects the broad intentions of this book. The essay titles range far and wide, from prehistoric and biblical bees, to Aristotle, 'Bees in Outer Space' and a lost film about Sherlock Holmes' bees. As you can see, this is a very wide field. Personally, I found the essays on Hungary and their way of beekeeping the most interesting and new. I had never heard of Dániel Berzsenyi, or Béla Hamvas and their Apiaries, and since neither is included in Eva Crane's index, I found this genuinely informative. The photos were fascinating. Sennyey has included many old photos of Bee Houses, and a weird and wonderful selection of old hives. I was absolutely delighted to see hives in human form (pp63 & 67). as well as the more familiar log and tree hives, etc. A hive in the form of a clergyman holding his Bible showed me more about the spiritual connection Sennyey talks of than the word 'anthropomorphic' could convey. I particularly treasure the idea that 'beekeeping is the poetry of agriculture', attributed to Béla Gunda ('Beekeeping among the Hungarians', 1992.)

A good deal of his discussion hinges on the relation of beekeeping to the environment and climate warming. I expect these parts will be more familiar to a reader in English, but there are one or two details which I was glad to pick up. Sennyey claims that Luis Méndez de Torres recognised the 'king' bee was a female in 1586 ("I have seen with my own eyes that the king is laying eggs") which Sennyey glosses as 'was a female'. This is at variance with other writers, who consider Charles Butler to be the first person to write about this in his book, The Feminine Monarchy (1609) which Sennyey rather dismissively considers to have been intended as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth the First, though she died six years before it was published.

Quibbles aside, this is a pleasant book to browse through, chapter not necessarily following chapter, as the spirit moves you. It is also a book which is produced to an excellent standard, with good illustrations and clear type. The fact that it lacks an index means that it cannot really be recommended as a reference book, but nonetheless it would make a worthwhile addition to your beekeeping library.