Uneasy about her future and struggling to settle into her new house in Oxford, Helen Jukes is given a colony of honeybees. According to folklore, a colony, freely given, brings good luck, and so Jukes embarks on a rewarding, perilous journey of becoming a beekeeper. While delving into the history of this strange discipline, Jukes writes about what it means to "keep" wild creatures whose laws and logic are so different from our own, and she meditates here on what bees can tell us about solitude and community.

"As strange, beautiful, and unexpected, as precise and exquisite in its movings as bees in a hive. I loved it."—Helen Macdonald