That first close encounter was at once terrifying and exhilarating for May, and in that moment she discovered that everything she needed to know about life and family was right before her eyes, in the secret world of bees. She was five years old, her parents had recently split and suddenly she found herself in the care of her grandfather, an eccentric beekeeper who made honey in a rusty old military bus in the yard.

Meredith May recalls the first time a honeybee crawled on her arm. It’s satisfying to let this book be her “bee dance,” in which she tells the tale of where she’s been and what she’s seen to us, her human hive.An extraordinary story of a girl, her grandfather and one of nature’s most mysterious and beguiling creatures: the honeybee. To May’s credit, she doesn’t try to tie up all the loose ends but is determined, rather, to tell the story as it happened. While May answers some of those questions-she finds a way to explain her mother’s narcissistic personality, for instance-much remains a mystery. Eventually, though, Meredith is ready for the heat, hard work and danger of processing honey in the bus, much as she matures into processing the many unanswered questions of her childhood. May captures the flavor of her 1970s childhood, a time when a brother and sister could play all day unsupervised, hide away in the high branches of trees and plot to get into Grampa’s “honey bus,” a den of creation they are deemed too young to enter for many years. Under his gentle tutelage, she learns about the complex family dynamics of the hive, the role of the queen and what happens to a bee colony when everything goes wrong. All she knows for sure is that her grandfather, a beekeeper, is there to take her hand and immerse her in the astonishing world of the honeybee. When they arrive at her grandparents’ home and her mother goes straight to the bedroom-where she stays for days, weeks, months, even years-we don’t know why. When a 5-year-old Meredith gets on a plane with her mother and brother, leaving her father at the airport, readers are just as perplexed as she is.

With a voice that is at once as innocent as a young child’s should be and yet as preternaturally mature as children from dysfunctional homes often have to be in order to survive, Meredith May invites us into the inexplicable yet strangely hopeful world of her California childhood in this moving memoir.

The honey bus book