"Weaving a vivid portrait of her own life and her bees’ lives, Sue Hubbell lovingly describes the ins and outs of beekeeping on her small Missouri farm, where the end of one honey season is the start of the next. With three hundred hives, Hubbell stays busy year-round tending to the bees and harvesting their honey, a process that is as personally demanding as it is rewarding. Exploring the progression of both the author and the hive through the seasons, this is “a book about bees to be sure, but it is also about other things: the important difference between loneliness and solitude; the seasonal rhythms inherent in rural living; the achievement of independence; the accommodating of oneself to nature” (Philadelphia Inquirer). Beautifully written and full of exquisitely rendered details, it is a tribute to Hubbell’s wild hilltop in the Ozarks and of the joys of living a complex life in a simple place."
"A 'delightful, witty' memoir about starting over as a beekeeper in the Ozarks (Library Journal).
Alone on a small Missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world. Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things she cared about.
Describing the ups and downs of beekeeping from one springtime to the next, A Country Year transports listeners to a different, simpler place. In a series of exquisite vignettes, Hubbell reveals the joys of a life attuned to nature in this heartfelt memoir about life on the land, and of a woman finding her way in middle age."
"Most of us think of bugs as pesky creatures we inadvertently squish beneath our feet. Under the microscope of Sue Hubbell’s keen eye there emerges a world we rarely take the time to see.
Noting in her opening chapter that for every pound of us there are 300 pounds of bugs, Hubbell approaches 13 quirky comrades of our natural world by asking one simple question: “What are they up to?”
In addition to her layman’s expertise, Hubbell draws on the knowledge of various entomologists—a gregarious crew who disturb the studied calm of Capitol Hill restaurants by mimicking a katydid’s song or the mating habits of the ladybug."
"'We humans are a minority of giants, stumbling around in the world of little things,' Sue Hubbell writes in this marvelous book. Each of these little things 'has a complicated and special way of getting on in the world, different from ours and different from one another's.'
In Waiting for Aphrodite she explores the ways of sponges and sea urchins, horseshoe crabs and the sea mouse known as Aphrodite—as well as our ways. She takes us on a journey through the mysteries of time—geological, biological, and personal—as she writes of the evolution of life on this planet and the evolution of her own life: her childhood next to a Michigan graveyard; the three colleges where she 'learned three things'; her twenty-five years keeping bees on a farm in the Ozarks; her move to a 'strange little house' in a small Maine town, 'the place I wanted to grow old in.' And in the tide pools and ocean waters there she discovered a whole new world, the world of little things that inspired this book.
'In her new book, Hubbell becomes a Shakespeare of advocacy for some of the more ignored denizens of our complicated planet.'—Newsday"
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