One of a steadily growing collection of bee-keeping related books in my collection. I'll add a few more in coming weeks as I get to review them steadily. This particular offering is sold on the basis that its the only book dealing specifically with the observation hive. Having just procured such an item from eBay, this title from AbeBooks seemed like a good starting place to try to cover all the information I need to start up a small colony of bees using a few frames from the existing three hives in the apiary. However, as a practical "How to" type of book this leaves me slightly underimpressed. Perhaps it wasn't the aim of the author to discuss in detail how observation hives work. What he has done is to spend most of the book informing the reader what an observation hive looks like and who has used one in the past. The pertinent section for my purposes is Chapter 5: Stocking and Care of an Observation Hive (pp. 63-75). Of these twelve pages, only one or two paragraphs actually deal with actionable details. He says: "Preparing nuclei from a number of colonies may be practised as part of the main apiary swarm control system but it does add a further complication to preliminary work." What those complications might be, and how preparation of nuclei add to normal swarm control are not mentioned further. Basically, I didn't learn anything from this book that I haven't already learned from other beekeeping books or from the practise of beekeeping in the apiary. And that is not to mean that I know very much. Three seasons practice, with one or two complete failures and three hives extant is my record to date. Not much knowledge. so to read a book like this, purporting to be a specialist sub-section of beekeeping, and to learn nothing new is disappointing. Perhaps it is unfair of me to expect a technical manual when this clearly is not one, and was written at a time when technical User Manuals were still a thing of the future. In terms of utility then, I am disappointed.
