Most people wouldn’t associate the Venice region with apiculture. But the lagoon has actually been a haven for beekeeping for hundreds of years – and more than that, it’s home to “a community of pollinators”: the people who keep the tradition alive, in spite of environmental decline and transformation. The barene (the marshland and sandbars that are a vital component of the lagoon ecosystem) are a landscape in the process of extinction. That turns the honey produced from the plants on the barene into something rare and precious. Nowadays, Venetian apiculture take place in a context of scarcity, lack and gradual loss: the loss of beekeepers in Venice’s dwindling population, of consumers, and also of land suitable for beekeeping.

Spadano’s exploration of this clandestine world – astonishingly a central part of the agricultural and productive fabric of Venice and yet utterly hidden – reveals how bees are key to understanding the landscape’s state of health. They are the canary in the coal mine, the “ecological sentinels” as Spadano puts it, who have been sending us signals for years, sounding the alarm about the transformations taking place in the extremely ecologically valuable salt marshes. Spadano meets different beekeepers operating across the lagoon, follows them as they try to find a suitable place to set up the hives, and introduces the reader to a pace of life dictated by the rhythms and signals of the hive – warnings that we would do well to heed.

Catherine Bennett