A French priest spent years testing hive designs and settled on a stack of small boxes that imitates a hollow tree. Here is what is documented about the Warré hive, how it works, and where it sits in the long story of beekeeping.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Long before anyone built a hive, honey bees lived in hollow trees, and people learned to find them, climb to them and, in parts of Europe, manage them. This is the natural history behind the plate.

Bee boles are the small arched recesses left in old garden walls, built to shelter straw skeps. Here is what they were for, how they worked, and why we can be less certain about their dates than their charm suggests.