How to Keep Bees

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Anna Botsford Comstock's How to Keep Bees is a warm, practical handbook for anyone eager to begin beekeeping without being overwhelmed. From the first pages, it treats bees as more than honey-makers: they are a source of pleasure, education, modest income, and quiet beauty for the home garden, while also offering recreation, science, and a deeper connection to nature. Comstock's firsthand voice is friendly, humorous, and reassuring, making the book especially inviting for beginners and small household apiaries. The guidance is concrete and wide-ranging, covering how to start modestly, choose Italian bees, queens, hives, and equipment, and site an apiary with sun, shade, and shelter. It explains how to manage colonies, encourage honey production, harvest and finish comb-honey, and protect it from pests, spoilage, and granulation. Richly illustrated and thoughtfully organized, the book presents beekeeping as both a manageable craft and a rewarding way of life.