Two very different insects share the name hornet in a beekeeper’s year: a big, mostly gentle native, and a smaller invader that hunts at the hive door. Here is what each really does, and how bees and beekeepers respond.

A swarm is not a colony in trouble. It is a colony reproducing, and the story behind it runs from queen cells in the brood nest to a cluster on a branch choosing its next home.

The wax moth is often described as a villain of the hive, but its real story is quieter and more interesting. Here is what it is, where it lives, and how bees and beekeepers live alongside it.

A honey bee colony does not hibernate. It draws into a living, shivering ball and burns its own stores to stay warm, and a beekeeper reads the story from outside the box.

Nearly every bee you see on a flower is a worker, and her life is a sequence of jobs that no other bee in the colony does. This is the natural history behind the plate.

Koschevnikov’s honey bee, Apis koschevnikovi, is a reddish cavity-nesting bee of the forests of Borneo, Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Here is what is known about how it lives, how it differs from the western honey bee, and why beekeepers rarely meet it.

A top-bar hive is a long box with a row of wooden bars across the top and no frames at all. Here is where the idea came from, how it works, and what it asks of the beekeeper.

Basswood, or American linden, flowers for only a short spell in early summer, yet beekeepers have long watched for it. Here is where it grows, what it offers bees, and why we drew it.

A Philadelphia-born clergyman noticed that bees leave a small, consistent gap and built a hive around it. Here is how the Langstroth hive works, who came before it, and what it changed.

Tupelo is a modest swamp tree of the south-eastern United States, and its short spring flowering gives one of the most distinctive honeys beekeepers make. Here is where it grows, when it flowers, and how beekeepers have worked around it.