When her thirty-year marriage broke up, Sue Hubbell found herself alone and broke on a small Ozarks farm. Keeping bees, she found solace in the natural world. She began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things that she cared about. The result is one of the best-loved books ever written about life on the land, about a woman finding her way in middle age.

A New York Times Notable Book, Sue Hubbell's A Book of Bees is a melodious mix of memoir, nature journal, and beekeeping manual (Kirkus Reviews).

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.

Includes Photographs by Sam Potthoff.

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 this timely and controversial work, Sue Hubbell contends that the concept of genetic engineering is anything but new, for humans have been tinkering with genetics for centuries. Focusing on four specific examples -- corn, silkworms, domestic cats, and apples -- she traces the histories of species that have been fundamentally altered over the centuries by the whims and needs of people.