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The book is filled with beautiful photographs and also contains some of the best illustrations of bee anatomy and morphology. All told it contains centuries upon centuries of acquired apiary and labratory wisdom as well as a history of beekeeping. My "little honeys" are sure to benefit from a careful persual of this most comprehensive encyclopedic book. I am an apprenticing beekeeper, and while it's essential to get hands on experience, it's equally if not more important to have a compendium of experience, which is what one gets with this amazing book. Simply put it is the Beekeepers Bible.
It ignores significant contributions to beekeeping from foreign sources, and devotes too many pages to profiling Americans who made only minor contributions to beekeeping. It was invented by New Zealander Harry Cloake in the 1970's.
There are fourteen pages on the Root family history, plus several more in the introduction and several more in the Biographies section.The cardboard cover on this book probably will not endure as well as the cloth covers on previous editions.On the positive side, the book is rich with facts about beekeeping. Too many pages are spent on the publisher's own beekeeping family tree.
This 41st edition of the classic ABC and XYZ of Beekeeping book is a wealth of information on beekeeping. (2) There is no mention of the graftless cell-plug kit method of queen rearing that won Apimondia's top award in 1986, invented by Karl Jenter of Germany.(3) There is no mention of the Cloake Board, a clever device for queen-rearing that easily converts colonies between queenless and queen-right cellbuilders.
Most readers wanting a single reference book on beekeeping would probably prefer Dadant's The Hive and the Honey Bee. However, it is not up to the quality of previous editions due its even more extreme ethnocentric American bias.
A few eaxmples: (1) There is no mention of Petro Prokopovych of Ukraine, widely credited with inventing and using moveable frame bee hives long before the American Langstroth hive was invented.
Langstroth the father of modern beekeeping is important and should be included, but I didn't need to know about the first apiary inspector in Wisconsin. L.L. The biographies should be spun off into a separate book. Lots of good information, but missed a few things such as the slatted rack. And nothing on colony colapse disorder, but CCD came out after this edition.only real problem that needs to be addressed it that much of the book is taken up by biographies of beekeepers.
may offer a course in beekeeping this is THE encyclopedia of beekeeping and a must have for any beekeepers library, but it is not the first book you should get as with all encyclopedias it is a dry read. good places to start are the MAAREC website has good starter information and your local beekeepers assoc.
I found it very interesting especially for grasping a basic understanding of certain topics. Being a new beekeeper, I found this volume very helpful for quitting acquainted with a lot of beekeeping topics.
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