The Hive and the Honey Bee (Hardcover)

by Dadent & Sons (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Extensively revised 4th edition based on Langsforth's original 1857 book. Cloth clad hard cove. 740 pages. Inside flaps are pictorial with photgraphs of a bee keeper and bees. Twenty-two chapters.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 740 pages
• Publisher: Dadant & Sons; Revised edition (1975)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000I9HQYQ
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #787,007 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Outdated, but worth the money, July 7, 2008

By	David C. Oshel "grikdog" (Cedar Rapids, IA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

L. L. Langstroth published his classic in 1853. It's public domain, and you can find it at Cornell University's online library at [...] and (iirc) at Project Gutenberg. Langstroth designed the first modern beehive after closely observing "bee space," which meant that, by cooperating with a natural tendency of the bees themselves, beekeepers no longer had to hack apart their hives in order to lift out the frames.

What Dadant & Sons (Editors) did, from 1946 to 1975, was to update and continue Langstroth's work, in scope and spirit if not in every slavish detail, with the works and studies of beekeepers, apiculturists and entomologists. The book was extensively revised in 1963 and again in 1975.

In 2008, Dadant & Sons edition is out of print, although Langstroth's original has been reissued by various publishers.

Since 1975, of course, the beekeeping industry has encountered new pests, exotic diseases like Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV), new environmental hazards such as IMD and other chlorinatated "neo-nicotinoids", aggressive alien strains such as the so-called Africanized bee, and the great bugbear of the 21st century, Colony Collapse Disorder, which has killed off as much as a third of all bee colonies world wide and inflamed passionate accusations and denials from all corners of modern agriculture including the agrichemicals industry.

None of that is discussed in any edition of Dadant's Hive and the Honebee, but they are well aware of these situations -- Dadant and Co. is the modern publisher of the highly respected American Bee Journal.