I succeeded Dr Eva Crane as Editor of Apicultural Abstracts a year ago, and have been invited to write about the journal in this Guest Editorial. When I first started work at IBRA in 1973 I found that many other abstracting units described themselves as being "attached to host libraries"-a phrase which suggested to me, a biologist, that they were parasitic in nature. I soon discovered that the relationship between Apicultural Abstracts and the rest of IBRA was more akin to a symbiosis -a term generally restricted to special associations.
