“I watched my mother and how she gave up so easily, and I never want to be like that. “We only need one thing to tell us we’re OK, and we’ll be fine,” she says now. They helped sustain her own sense of self worth and gave her hope in human resilience. Her adolescent pangs, complicated by the difficult parent-child relationship and a family whose cycles of abuse and neglect went back generations, were counterbalanced by her attentive grandpa and the delight she took in the bees and their hives. She and her younger brother virtually raised themselves with the assistance of grandparents who displayed eccentricities of their own. A former San Francisco Chronicle reporter and fifth-generation beekeeper, May, describes her family’s toxic history with surprising candor and vivid, often gorgeous prose.įollowing her parents’ abrupt separation and a swift move from Rhode Island to California, May watched helplessly as her mother receded into neurosis, depression and seclusion. May’s new memoir, “The Honey Bus” (Park Row Books, $25, 336 pages) is an intricate, extraordinary story that draws parallels between the social realms of honeybees and human families.

(Apr.Honeybees, an unconventional grandfather and a 1951 military bus-turned-honey bottling factory were salvation for Carmel Valley writer Meredith May. May’s chronicle of overcoming obstacles and forging ahead is moving and thoughtful. May learned that, unlike her mother, she needed to look at what she had-her grandfather and a gift for beekeeping-rather than what was missing. It was through the honeybees, she writes, that “I learned to persevere.” Leaving for college was a turning point for her: it was then that her mother shared her own history of physical abuse at her father’s hands.

Nicknamed “The Beekeeper of Big Sur” by his customers, he drove his retrofitted former military bus to tend to his 100 hives along the coast and provided May a fascinating education, teaching her about how bees communicate, eat, and protect their queen. But May bonded and found safety, first with her kind step-grandfather, and later with the bees he kept to produce his prized honey. May was forced to grow up fast with an increasingly unstable and neglectful mother. When her newly separated mother brought May and her brother from Rhode Island to the West Coast to live with her parents, bees were terrifying to the five-year-old.

Journalist May (coauthor, I, Who Did Not Die), a fifth-generation beekeeper in San Francisco, delivers a powerful account of growing up in 1970s California.

The Honey Bus by Meredith May