Apis laboriosa is the largest honey bee in the world, and it builds a single open comb on Himalayan cliff faces rather than in a hollow. Here is what is actually known about how it lives, and how it differs from the bee in a British hive.

The drone has a mother but no father, cannot sting, and does one job for the whole colony. Here is what beekeepers have learned about him, from his odd beginnings to his autumn eviction.

Before the modern white hive, bees lived in walls, on benches and under straw caps. We look at how the apiary was sited, sheltered and arranged, and why the old rules still hold.

Apis cerana is the honey bee of Asia, a cavity nester with its own ways of building, dancing and defending. Here is its natural history, and how it differs from the western honey bee we know best.

She is the only fertile female in a colony of tens of thousands, yet she rules nothing. Here is the natural history of the honey bee queen, from a sixteen day start to a year spent laying.

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.