The Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth kept bees in Oxford, Massachusetts, and in 1851 noticed something nobody had: bees leave a gap of about three-eighths of an inch between their combs and seal anything narrower or wider. Build a hive that respects that measurement and the frames lift out clean. Every movable-frame hive in the world descends from the observation, and the standard box in your own apiary is named after him.
This is his own account of it, the fourth and final edition, carrying his last revisions. It runs from the physiology of the queen, drone and worker through swarming, wax and honey production, feeding, diseases and enemies, to the practical business of handling a colony without being stung.
What keeps it in print after a hundred and seventy years is the voice. Langstroth was a minister and a man in love with his subject, and the chapter headings give him away: the kindness of bees to one another, their infatuation for liquid sweets, the warning given by bees before stinging. He explains the mathematics of comb and then stops to marvel at it. The science and the wonder are not separated, because he did not think they were separable.
Read it for the founding and for the pleasure. For this season's mite treatment you will want something newer, and no book from 1853 will tell you about varroa. But nothing written since has been as glad about bees.
