Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation | 
 enlarge | Author: Tammy Horn
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 302354
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0813191637
Dewey Decimal Number: 595
EAN: 9780813191638
ASIN: 0813191637
Publication Date: April 21, 2006
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Product Description
?Queen Bee, ? ?busy as a bee, ? and ?the land of milk and honey? are expressions that permeate the language within American culture. Music, movies, art, advertising, poetry, children's books, and literature all incorporate the dynamic image of the tiny, industrious honey bee into our popular imagination. Honey bees?and the values associated with them?have influenced American values for four centuries. Bees and beekeepers have represented order and stability in a country without a national religion, political party, language, or family structure. 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. In turn, the Puritan work ethic was modeled after the beehive, and this model continues to influence American definitions of success. Still a powerful symbol today, the honey bee is both a source of income and a metaphor for America's place at the center of global advances in information and technology.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation March 7, 2008
Tammy Horn has taken a bold tack in her sweeping history of beekeeping in "Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation." It is a bold title and indeed, maybe a little too bold. She endeavors to cover a lot of ground and to draw an analogy to the settlement of a nation with the spread of honeybees and beekeeping.
I found her writing was at its best when describing the history of the importation of honeybees from the old world, the spread and keeping of honeybees in the new world for pollinating those fruits and vegetables from the old world--but now being grown in the new world.
Perhaps her strongest chapter is the one in which she describes the effect upon American Indians in observing the "white man's fly." Here is insight into the trigger event for Indians to remove themselves from their historic grounds, for as the bees came in, so too would settlement and occupation of the land. The Indians realized that that once this happened, their historic way of life was gone. The "white man's fly" was the canary in the coal mine--a sign of danger, time to go. The Indians knew that along with settlement, the white man brought with him old world diseases which American Indians had little or no resistance to, which could decimate their numbers.
Other chapters in "Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation" are uneven. Some are stronger than others. The analogy that Tammy Horn pushes into the 20th century, "i.e., the shaping of America," is stretched a bit too far.
This book will not help a beekeeper keep bees. But that is not its purpose. I think it a strong first work. I would like to have seen a tighter, sharper focus with less editorial.
 engrossing December 20, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Beekeeping in the American historical context.
Though the text is a bit academic, I picked up this book and couldn't put it down. I read it in about 3 days. The numerous ways that the honey bee and beekeeping has woven themselves into our history and culture is fascinating. Ms. Horn has done some tremendous research on the subject.
Pretty lame if you are a beekeeper... October 24, 2005
6 out of 13 found this review helpful
I've been keeping bees for 40 years and during that time have assimilated a lot of info from trade journals, academic texts, etc. I was pretty bored with the whole thing. I was not expecting a technical book but I just found it poorly edited.
 history of bees August 13, 2005
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
a very good book about the beekeeping and the history of bees
in a nation which envy by others
Bees In America: How The Honey Bee Shaped A Nation July 20, 2005
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Excellent review of history of bees-beekeeping in America from a historical, cultural and global perspective. It is not a technically laden text. This would be a great book for extra credit reading - discussion for an American History college/university course. It is highly recommended for both general and scholarly readers.
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