FOREWORD 



The beginner in any field is always 

 more or less at sea. There are always lit- 

 tle, fundamental things that he wants to 

 know and too often these same little things 

 are the most difficult to discover. 



Often, too, when a man learns enough 

 of any one subject to write a book about 

 it, he forgets or overlooks some of the 

 fundamental things that he learned in his 

 own beginnings and as a result assumes 

 that his readers know as much about his 

 subject as he does himself. 



In this little book I have tried to keep 

 in mind my own troubles when I first 

 started to cultivate the festive bee. I 

 then knew the creatures only as an ento- 

 mologist would know them. To me they 

 were merely a species of insect having 

 certain anatomical characters. I knew 

 their life-history in a perfunctory way, 



