Synopsis: Keep your own bees and enjoy delicious golden honey from your own backyard. With his respect and admiration for bees evident on every page, Richard E. Bonney describes how to acquire bees, manage a hive, prevent and treat diseases, and extract a crop of honey. Enthusiastic beekeepers of every stripe and experience level will benefit from Bonney's astonishing knowledge of the craft -- from beekeeping history and honeybee biology to the complex social structure of the hive.

This is my favorite book to start learning beekeeping. It goes through all practical knowledge needed to become a beekeeper. And it's not just me. Mountain Sweet Honey, a very popular online store for beekeepers that sells all sorts of apiary equipment, gives this book to new beekeepers who buy their starter kits. I used this book to form the structure of the curriculum, and it would act as a perfect "textbook" for the course. If students are serious about beekeeping, reading this book while working with an experienced beekeeper at the MFS apiary will make sure they have all the knowledge necessary to keep themselves and the bees safe. At 170 pages, this book manages to be very comprehensive. However, I (and the beekeeper who wrote this book) believe that continuing education is necessary for beekeepers. Just reading this book once is not enough. New developments and techniques are constantly being made to combat new pathogens, parasites, and human-caused issues. Outside research will be utilized in this Introduction to Beekeeping elective.