Every Step in Beekeeping

Index; Why keep Bees The Hive Bee Business How to get the bees Hive Management Bee Diseases Honey Plants Wintering The beginner in any field is always more or less at sea. There are always lit- tle, fundamental things that he wants to know and too often these same little things are the most difficult to discover. Often, too, when a man learns enough of any one subject to write a book about it, he forgets or overlooks some of the fundamental things that he learned in his own beginnings and as a result assumes that his readers know as much about his subject as he does himself. In this little book I have tried to keep in mind my own troubles when I first started to cultivate the festive bee. I then knew the creatures only as an ento- mologist would know them. To me they were merely a species of insect having certain anatomical characters. I knew their life-history in a perfunctory way, but when it came to real knowledge of their habits, I had none. But for the kindly help of the man to whom this volume is dedicated my flound- erings would have been prolonged and I would have accumulated information as I accumulated stings - by a painful process. A book of this size does not and can not claim to tell all there is to know on the subject of beekeeping in spite of its title. The subject is a big one and it has many sides. The beekeeper must be content to be a student, learning a little each year and with the consolation that men have spent their lives in the study only to leave many unsolved problems behind them. If the little book serves as an introduc- tion to the fascinating business of keeping bees and if it guides the steps of its read- ers in the right direction it has fulfilled its purpose. The writer has had no other object in view. B. W. D.