A honeypot is a destination on your private network that you don’t use for normal purposes. Any attempt to access it is by definition anomalous and therefore an indication that a security breach of some kind is in progress. This simple idea is what makes a honeypot a valuable network security alarm.
A honeynet is a collection of honeypots, though a single machine and network interface card is sufficient to simulate a honeynet.
SANS provides an informative overview of honeypot/honeynet technology that is interesting whether or not you are personally responsible for network security. It is listed as the December 1, 2005 Wednesday Webcast entitled “Honeypots” on the SANS webcast archive page at
https://www.sans.org/webcasts/archive.php
See the Howto for information on how to access a SANS webcast.