Here Be Stings and Honey

Here Be: Stings and Honey: Here Be post 4

 Bees and Honey = Money in Cockney rhyming slang, but there’s also the idea of stings and honey; the flipsides of dealing with buzzyfolk. Wasps are a different thing, but also a challenge (especially if you pick apples) so I included them when I collected a handful of my books for this theme.

In Daisy Toes, a bee sting ruins Mimi’s romantic attempt to re-enact a scene from the Princess of the Lake.

In Hero, bees provide Tim with the clue he needs to communicate with aliens who stole his lucky buckle.  

There are no bees in Honey and the Harvest Hob, but Honeycomb Bakewell was named, as she points out waspishly (ha!) to her mum, after a bee larder. Skye's excuse? Honeycomb and her father Simon both smell of honey. When she meets the harvest hob of the title, she enjoys honey on brown bread.

In I Promise, Valentine Caffrey is swathed in a bee-veil when he encounters Promise Grene for the first time in years. The two of them bond over a shared talent.

In Sam and the Sylvan, Sam’s new friend Oash gets creative with a honeycomb. He just loves sticky things, and, as Sam says later in Sunshower, he gets indecently excited about apricot jam.

In A Sticky Picture, a flock of wasps invades an art exhibition and it’s all Toby’s fault. He should never have gone near Aunt Victoria’s painting while eating a sticky sandwich.

In Wilderness, Allie’s heart is shattered when her daughter Rosslyn dies of her first (and last) bee sting during a wilderness trip that was Allie’s last-ditch attempt at mother-daughter bonding.

So - bees and honey = money. I could have added books based on money, but the only one I could scare up was Three Loony Months, in which the Archer family attempts to make some!

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of June 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places, objects and themes. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!