Lexington, KY - Bees have long been used as a metaphor in writing of many types. Business authors have certainly used the busy demeanor of bees to explore a range of topics, including leadership, efficiency, teamwork and growth.
When bee expert and Eastern Kentucky University professor Tammy Horn writes about bees, her goal is not to hone a clever metaphor but to get down to serious business — no less than economic transformation and personal empowerment for women through a relationship with bees. Her most recent book, Beeconomy: What Women and Bees Can Teach Us about Local Trade and the Global Market, establishes her as a pre-eminent expert in this field as well as an eloquent voice in securing the future of this topic.
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It’s important to note the impressive credentials Horn brings to the writing of this book. Raised with beekeepers on both sides of her family, today she is director of the Coal Country Beeworks, a multi-service project that reclaims former surface mine sites as bee habitats. There are currently seven such sites in eastern Kentucky, complete with more than 100 hives.
In addition to her work as senior researcher at the Environmental Research Institute, she has written some of the premier texts on bees. Beeconomy is the second in a trilogy that began with Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation. She currently is working on Apiforestation: The Future of Beekeeping. The trilogy will form a comprehensive look at the past, present and future of beekeeping.
In Beeconomy, Horn explores both the historical and contemporary role of women in beekeeping around the world. She invites the reader on an extended journey, traveling to every continent except Antarctica to explore the relationship between women and the art and business of beekeeping.
She starts by describing bee safaris in Africa. As a travel guide, Horn is both highly informative as well as personable. At one point, she notes with an insider’s almost gossip-laden whisper that bees from one area “could be called cranky.” In another incident, she describes how a bee nest is mesmerizing and almost mystically draws her closer.
While the first written histories of beekeeping come from Egypt, rock-art illustrations show that honey bees were cultivated much earlier. While Egyptians linked bees to the maternity goddess Nut, the mother of Ra, the sun god, conquerors such as the Greeks and Romans had their own goddesses tied to the bee. Early Christians in the Middle East depicted the Virgin Mary with bees, symbolizing her chastity and fertility.
The author expertly provides the right amount of historical background to provide context for discussion of contemporary beekeeping. Her skill in doing so not only makes for a fascinating read, but a supportive and encouraging guidebook for women.
Horn takes the reader on to India where international groups have made efforts to involve Indian women in beekeeping workshops to improve the quality of rural life. Visits to Russia, Southeast Asia and Turkey focus on a wide spectrum of contemporary women and beekeeping. Moving west across the globe, she plunges into the well-documented history of women beekeepers in Europe before crossing the ocean to examine the introduction of the honey bee to North America in the 1600s. The journey then continues in Asia and Australia, where bees were not native, but imported from England. In South America, the last continent to be discussed, Horn highlights the biological revolution that took place with the human introduction of the African honey bee.
Of note is the involvement of women in Afghanistan and Iraq with bees. U.S. National Guard specialists engaged in nation-building programs in Iraq included apiculture focused on women. In one graduating class, 80 percent of students were widows. The Kentucky Agricultural Development Team worked with others on a project in Kapisa, Afghanistan, to supply women with beehives and teach them management skills.
Horn shares the deeper understandings of life she comes to discover as she learns more about bees. In Africa, she learns a word that she considers more vital to her understanding than any other: fungwe. It is defined as “the deeper thirst and instinct to culminate an attraction for something; a desire that, if fulfilled, will shape one’s entire destiny.” For Horn, bees define fungwe. They bring her “closer to the pulsating life force driving our evolutionary fits and starts than I have ever been.”
It is that passion that makes Beeconomy such an exceptional work.