Honey and Venom: Confessions of an Urban Beekeeper

In this delightful debut, New York City beekeeper Coté recounts a year of raising bees and the big adventures these tiny insects have brought to his life. In his 20s with a cushy professorship, Coté chucked it all to turn his honey-making hobby into his career. Following in the footsteps of his Quebecois father, a firefighter turned professional beekeeper, Coté becomes an expert apiarist in the Big Apple, placing and tending to bees all over the five boroughs and helping to get beekeeping legalized in New York City. Along the way, he starts Bees Without Borders, a nonprofit that promotes beekeeping in third world countries; helps create a bee sculpture for MoMA; works with the NYPD to capture swarms of bees; and travels to Iraq where he talks with religious Iraqi residents who take exception to the fact that a queen bee “copulates with many drones.” Throughout, he writes sweetly about the life cycle of the honey bee and praises his father, who “holds more information about bees in one hair of his white moustache than I will ever know.” Honey farmers and urban naturalists will be buzzing about this one. (June)