The Complete Beekeeper, by Gabriel Wilson OSB (264pp, Gracewing, £20)

This is an impossibly lovely book, written by a Benedictine monk and beekeeper. We learn early on that these two callings are symbiotic. Many spiritual writers have written on the harmony of the hive and the moral lessons to be drawn from bees. Monks and bees live in community. And from everything Gabriel Wilson writes – in delicious, sensuous prose – it is clear that working with bees entails the active and contemplative virtues.

Much of the time, this beekeeper simply listens to his bees, watches and waits. When he intervenes it is with care for the season and the condition of the hive. Indeed one of his most eloquent accounts is of a beekeeper – is it he? – who does next to nothing, who does not use a fumigator nor curb the parasites on the creatures but simply leaves well alone, to the bemusement of his fellow apiarists. And the bees do just fine. “He found a kind of surrender in which the bees lived or died by their own design etched into the very marrow of flowers and time, rather than by his ingenuity.”

The bees do sting occasionally, but Gabriel Wilson bears the scars with marvellous stoicism. Gloomily, I compare this equanimity with my hysteria on the unhappy occasion when a couple of bees got in my hair and a helpful friend tried to crush them with a table tennis bat.

The reader who is utterly ignorant of beekeeping and indeed the monastic life will learn about both here. Men have kept bees for much of human history but, like every other form of cultivation, apiculture has been industrialised through mass production and has fallen victim to the loss of farmland and of natural habitats to development.

Beekeeping has also fallen victim to globalisation – as a result of the ill-conceived transport of bee populations across the world a century ago, the destructive varroa mite jumped from Asian bees to European ones, which has taken a terrible toll on native populations. Gabriel Wilson compares the varroa blight to sin, which undermines the human person from inside. He also discusses stratagems, which I found fascinating, for dealing with the parasites, including disrupting the life cycle of the mites by subdividing the hive and removing the Queen.

There is a heartbreaking episode in which the beekeeper lifts the lids on the hives to find each one in turn filled with “bees curled inwards, like discarded punctuation… black and gold, faded to grey”; victim to one or other of men’s actions – perhaps the loss of biodiversity, pesticide use, the mites or climate change. The grief of the beekeeper is proportionate to the loving attention he has devoted to their care.

For it is clear that the beekeeper is sustained by his task. One of the most moving chapters discusses how beekeepers on the front in the Great War responded to the spectacle of hives behind the lines; one British soldier put the remains of a shelled hive in a barrow and wheeled it to safety. Among the men, beekeeping journals were immensely popular, a reminder of happier times, more innocent occupations. There was always fraternity between beekeepers.

The lovely, sensual prose is supplemented by poems on bees. There is a long tradition of poets and moralists taking lessons from bees – Isaac Watts’s “How Doth the Little Busy Bee” is just the most famous. As Dom Gabriel points out, an early exponent of the virtues of the bee was Virgil in his Georgics, though he made the telling mistake of misgendering the queen bee as “rex”. Gabriel Wilson is in this long and distinguished line; he belongs to an equally noble lineage of the writers of the medieval bestiaries, which discussed the attributes of each animal with reference to the vices and virtues they embody for the instruction of man.

“The image of bees coming and going freely… symbolises a key feature of prayer, namely, distractions. The constant flurry of activity at a beehive – bees constantly coming and going, buzzing in all directions – offers a vivid metaphor for the distractions that arise during prayer. Just as a hive is never truly still, the mind rarely settles completely when we attempt to pray… Like bees at a hive, however, these distractions are not failures of prayer, but a natural part of the environment.”

He does not sentimentalise the creatures. He acknowledges that bees, unlike men, do not enjoy leisure; he accepts with equanimity the planned brutality of the expulsion of the drones, the gamete carriers, once the Queen has mated, as part of the natural order.

But he finds endless ways in which the bees can instruct men: their sense of purpose, their effortless adoption of their own function in the community. And the beekeeper himself offers lessons to us:

“If there is a suitable metaphor for the Creator… it is the beekeeper at the hive, his sleeves rolled up, his heart open and his hands stung – and remaining close to his bees, not because he must, but because he chooses to. And because the full heart cannot walk away.”

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