This is a downloadable PDF.

Excerpt:

Before we can consider any form of 'bee keeping', we must make some attempt to understand the nature of the creature we will be dealing with.

The traditional approach to this subject invariably begins with pictures of individual bees. There are many books with diagrams and photographs of dissected honeybees, showing how their anatomy is arranged and how a dead bee looks under a microscope. I recommend you take a look through at least one of them so you have an idea how all the bits fit together and what they all do. Dade's Anatomy and Dissection of the Honeybee is one of the best.

However, as beekeepers – or potential beekeepers - and as observers of and participants in living nature - we are not so much interested in dead bees as in living ones. And as soon as we decide to look at living honeybees, we have to think, not in terms of individual bees, but in terms of the unit of survival: the colony.