Honey and Dust is the first book of Piers Moore-Ede, British born writer. It won the D. H. Lawrence Prize for non fiction 2007 and is published by Bloomsbury.
A stunning account of a personal journey and a man’s dream of tasting all the honeys in the world.
After being seriously injured in a hit-and-run, Piers Moore-Ede goes to an organic farm in Italy to recuperate. There, a beekeeper shows him the magic of the beehive and Piers, depressed since his accident, realises that honey might be his salve and salvation. This is the story of his quest to seek out the most wondrous honeys in the world, from the terracotta bee jars of the Lebanon to the clay cylinders of Syria. Slowly his personal tribulations fall into perspective against the backdrop of the dwindling traditions of the honey-farmers. Hunting wild honey from cliffs with Gurung tribesmen in Nepal, and in vast jungle trees with Veddah tribesmen in Sri Lanka, Piers draws close to the very origins of life. But honey is the real luminary of Honey and Dust and it is by witnessing nature’s astonishing healing powers that Piers finally finds his own sense of regeneration.
Tags:
Moore Ede sees honey as the quintessence of this cyclic exchange between man and the natural environment, and also as a food, medicine, energising aphrodisiac and even as a portal to the unconscious, given that some wild forms have almost hallucinogenic properties.
the highly aggressive bees, which swarm over his precariously dangled body in an angry black mass.
bee species Apis laboriosa
