A pocket-size visual history of the beehive. Since the birth of the modern beehive in 1852, innovation in hive construction has stalled: by favouring the standardised box hive, beekeeping turns its back on 4,400 years of architectural diversity. The book looks at the period before that homogenisation, back to 2400 BCE, and, rejecting a fixed narrative, mixes graphic design, photography and writing to retell the story in 375 images — a glimpse into a proliferous history of architecture for non-humans. It is a fragment of the open-ended research project "Apian" (a Ministry of Bees) on the relationship between bees and humans.