Excerpt from The Illustrated Australasian Bee Manual: And Complete Guide to Modern Bee Culture in the Southern Hemisphere So rapid is the present progress of commercial beekeeping, necessarily accompanied by frequent changes and modifications in apiary appliances and methods of management, that much of the practical instructions embodied in technical works on bee-culture published from time to time, soon become antiquated, and out of date. I realised this in the present case when commencing to revise the text matter of the last - in preparation for the new - Edition, and therefore I decided to re-write, and re-construct, the whole of the chapters specially dealing with the Manual work of the apiary, and thereby to bring this Edition right up to date. This has been done to the best of my ability, and I trust that the alterations and new matter, together with the additional illustrations, will meet with the approval of those for whom the book is published. My recent position as Chief Government Apiarist in New Zealand afforded me exceptional opportunities for observing how commercial bee-keeping can be, and is, conducted under different conditions, and by different types of bee-keepers. It also enabled me in the course of my duties to carry out experiments at the Government Apiaries to determine matters of great importance to the industry; some of the results of which have already been published in "Bulletin" No. 18 on Bee-Culture, obtainable from the offices of the Department of Agriculture. The results of the knowledge thus gained are embodied in the present volume. I would draw special attention to the remarkable progress made in commercial bee-keeping in New Zealand since the Government gave its support to the industry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book is one of the most practical beekeeping books I know of. Isaac Hopkins obviously had a lot of real life experience and not just a lot of book knowledge. This book was probably the most influential book on beekeeping in Australia and New Zealand. I also chose this because Hopkins presents in this version of the book one of the simplest ways of getting a lot of queens that also does not require a lot of special equipment known as "the Hopkins method of queen rearing". This is a great book on beekeeping in any location in any age. I have greatly expanded the Table of Contents to cover the topics that were in the index and removed the index.