A narrative by the author and beekeeper Ferdinand Gerstung about how Bruno Reichmann became a beekeeper. Illustrated with 132 black-and-white images. At Gerstung's suggestion, the first museum of its kind, the German Imperial Beekeeping Museum of the German Beekeepers' Association, was established in Weimar in 1907. For his contributions to bee science and beekeeping, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Jena in 1920 on the recommendation of Ludwig Plate, in celebration of his 60th birthday. Gerstung was the first to conceptualize the bee colony as a higher-order organism. According to Gerstung, it is no longer a "bee colony," but rather a bee. "The bee is an organism," whose functions are regulated by the flow of food juices. This so-called organismic perspective explains the life processes of bees in a fundamentally new way and earned Gerstung the honorary doctorate.