Hive Tour. The Insider’s Guide to Honey Bees. By Phil Frank and Frank Linton, with a forward by Dewey Caron. Published by Honey Tongue Press. ISBN 9798745339738. 8.5” x 11”, soft cover, 56 pages, color throughout. $25.00 on Amazon.

Frank Linton wrote a book awhile ago on observation hives, and he uses this experience to produce another book with coauthor Phil Frank, on showing all about bees, bee anatomy, hives and parts, bee food, bee behaviors and even hive intruders. In fact, they expect you to be using this book when you are looking at an observation hive. What a great idea!
It is excellently illustrated with photos by the two authors and even without the copy, would be a great book to explore.
Finding hive parts shows entrances, wax cells and comb, frames and bee space, feeders and more. And each of these has a fun fact to explore too. For instance, when finding a vent, the fun fact says bees fan moist air out of the vent to help dehydrate nectar – an essential step to making honey.
Finding adults includes stripes, old and young adults, queens and drones, eggs and larvae (now remember, these photos show a larvae larger than a dime on the page, very easy to see and learn from), drones and royal jelly.
Bee parts include the head, thorax and the rest, and then parts including the proboscis, the eyes, antennae and what they do, and yes, the stinger.
Bee food includes pollen, nectar and honey.
Behaviors include nurse bees, the retinue, fanning and undertaking.
Next come intruders, varroa, deformed wings, small hives beetles (here as big as a dime), wax moth and their larvae.
The book finishes with a Find Answers page, with 32 questions that were answered in the book, and this is followed by a long list of reference books to further your learning.
There is no doubt that taking this book to some place with an observation hive would be a great learning experience, especially if you are accompanied by someone who is eager to learn more.