Introduction to Beekeeping
A honey bee colony is not a collection of insects, it is one organism with about fifty thousand moving parts. One queen lays every egg. Her daughters live six weeks in summer and six months in winter, and they change jobs as they age: cleaning, then nursing, then building comb, then guarding the door, then foraging until they wear out. Everything you will do as a beekeeper is done to that organism, not to individual bees.