[The Red Baron]

Evening.....I'm looking to start keeping a hive or two. I've enrolled on my local BBKA course but that doesn't start until march! Just asking all beekeepers out there if there are any books for beginners you would recommend

[ghost61]

The Haynes manual, usually stocked by libraries, is a good start. Filled with lots of pictures and is an easy read. At my course, the tutors were of an age, and so all the books they recommended had been out of print for decades!

[Swing Swang]

Beekeeping - A Seasonal Guide - Ron Brown
Good balance between basics and more advances stuff, will probably be quite a useful reference for the first three years of beekeeping too. Nice ideas on protecting introduced queen cells with masking tape for example.

The Rose Hive Method - Tim Rowe
Basically beekeeping using 'one sized box' National Hives (deeper than a super, shallower than a brood chamber). Sold by Thorne's as the OSB. If you're just starting out this really is one to read especially as the management techniques that he describes are applicable to other hives. In particular he does not use a queen excluder, advocates inserting new boxes into the middle of the brood chamber before midsummer to develop large colonies, and he describes a simple way of increasing colonies. Some of the ideas will be different to the BBKA's standard approach, but it's worth considering using narrow 'foundation strips' in frames rather than sheets, and not using a queen excluder even if you don't feel brave enough to split the cluster with an empty box in the late spring.

Tob-Bar Hive Beekeeping Wisdom and Pleasure Combined - Wyatt A Mangum, Phd
This is a really good book on Top-Bar Beekeeping. Not Cheap, and you'll have to import it. Wyatt was a conventional beekeeper who for reasons described in the book built up a 200 top-bar hive commercial operation. Top-bar hives (TBHs) tend to attract 'natural' beekeepers whose ideas may be at odds with the BBKA's views (a 'leave alone' approach/biodynamics etc), however many ideas promoted by 'natural' beekeepers are worthy of consideration (allowing bees to develop their own cell size and number of drone cells by non/minimal use of foundation for example). Wyatt's book is the only book that I've read on TBHs that approaches TB beekeeping from a 'scientific' standpoint and therefore does not get cluttered up with too much 'philosophy'.

If you decide to investigate TBHs in more detail then Chandler's book and 'biobees' website is a good place to start, however in my very limited experience with both Nationals and Warre hives I would say that Warre's (a vertical TBH) are not really suited to densely packed urban environments (they are far more 'swarmy' because you can't thoroughly inspect them in standard form), or for club apiaries (because you can't thoroughly inspect them it is very difficult to convince people that you share an apiary with that your hives are free from certain types of disease etc, and in my opinion it would be unfair to impose your hives on other club members without their agreement).

I would avoid The Bee-friendly Beekeeper, A Sustainable approach - David Heaf. Much of the information is available on the Biobees website, and I do not warm to his chapter on agricultural and environmental ethic as applied to beekeeping, which by the time you've taken out the introduction/index/information readily available elsewhere etc leaves very little 'meat' for the money.