A clear and comprehensive guide to beekeeping. The number of people interested and active in keeping bees at an amateur level has continued to increase over the past few years in both rural and urban situations. This guide, aimed at beginning beekeepers, and the only one to be endorsed by the BBKA provides an authoritative text, along with clear photographs and illustrations. The book introduces the reader to beekeeping, including such areas as the workings of the colony, the structure of a hive, how to acquire bees and keep them healthy and what happens in each month in a beekeeping year. Each chapter is accompanied by anecdotes, answers to frequently asked questions and fascinating facts about bees and honey. The new edition includes new step-by-step sequences to illustrate procedures such as containing a swarm, identifying the queen, using a smoker and cleaning a hive as well as more information on different kinds of hives, disease management and many other key areas.

Seeley, a world authority on honey bees, sheds light on why wild honey bees are still thriving while those living in managed colonies are in crisis. Drawing on the latest science as well as insights from his own pioneering fieldwork, he describes in extraordinary detail how honey bees live in nature and shows how this differs significantly from their lives under the management of beekeepers. Seeley presents an entirely new approach to beekeeping--Darwinian Beekeeping--which enables honey bees to use the toolkit of survival skills their species has acquired over the past thirty million years, and to evolve solutions to the new challenges they face today. He shows beekeepers how to use the principles of natural selection to guide their practices, and he offers a new vision of how beekeeping can better align with the natural habits of honey bees.