The Art of Beekeeping – Bees and Humans: A Partnership Through Time

This is not a practical manual, but a book of essays at the crossroads of nature, culture, and thought.
Drawing on mythology, literature, art history, and contemporary science, The Art of Beekeeping examines how bees have shaped human imagination, agriculture, and ethics for thousands of years. For Weiner Sennyey, the practice of apiculture opens a path toward ecotherapy and biophilia – a renewed love of nature grounded in attention, humility, and care.
First published in two Hungarian editions, this book now appears in English for the first time in Deborah Marshall’s translation. In an age of ecological crisis, these essays offer neither easy solutions nor sentimentality, but something rarer: a language for thinking clearly, and living sanely, in an increasingly fragile world.
Tibor Weiner Sennyey is a Hungarian poet, writer, translator, editor and traveler, winner of the József Attila Prize. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, essays, short stories, short novels and dramas. He is the editor-in-chief of DRÓT, where he regularly publishes articles on public life, art and literature, and runs a video blog there. He gives lectures on literature, poetry, horticulture and beekeeping, with a special focus on Béla Hamvas, Sándor Weöres, the Garden Hungary idea and the ‘art of beekeeping’.