May 11, 2020 • 37 mins
Beekeeping as you might think of it today, with square hives and and a beekeeper in a white suit with a big veiled hat, is a relatively recent invention. But beekeeping has existed for thousands of years, basically all over the world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tray Stevie Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. I'm fond
of bees, me too. Yeah, I don't know if I've
(00:21):
mentioned that on the show before. And you know, I
spent way too much time yesterday ussuring a bee out
of my garage so I could close the door. So
this is especially timely. Yeah, you know, continuing the theme
of wanting to do some episodes that feel like they
are not catastrophically upsetting because of the state of the world.
(00:43):
I really like bees and bee keeping as you might
think of it today with square hives and the beekeeper
in the white suit with a big veiled hat. I mean,
that's a relatively recent invention, but bee keeping has a
practice has existed for thousands of years. Basically all over
the world. Every continent except Antarctica has native bee species
(01:06):
that store at least some honey in their nests, and
almost without exception, people who have lived near these bees
have developed methods to keep them and manage them, either
in their nests out in the wild, or in hives
that are made for that purpose. So this is really
a global story. It's one that has lots of pieces
that overlap and lots of different methods being practiced at
(01:28):
the same time. So, for example, if you're listening to
the episode and we're talking about methods of tracking wild
bees that are about two thousand years old, and you're thinking,
but wait, weren't people keeping bees in hives by that point?
We will get to that part two. Um. Also, we're
using the past heads for a lot of this episode
because we're talking about techniques and practices that started way
(01:49):
in the past. But in a lot of cases, these
same things, including hunting bees and keeping bees out in
the wild, like they're all they're still practiced today. They
did not go away. So most of humanities beekeeping efforts
have involved social bees that store honey in their nests.
Today that tends to be one of various subspecies of
the western or European honeybee or APIs mellifera, but there
(02:11):
are lots of other bees that also store honey and
they are part of bee keeping history to The giant
honeybee or APIs dorsada, is native to southern and Southeast Asia,
most tropical regions of the world have their own native
species of stingless bees. That name is something of a misnomer.
Most stingless bees do have stingers, but those stingers are
(02:33):
smaller and they don't usually have structures for injecting venom.
Other bees, including bumble bees, also store some honey, but
in much smaller amounts, and there are also honey storing
insects besides bees, including some species of wasps and ants.
People have harvested and used the honey and other resources
(02:53):
that all of these insects produced and store in their nests,
and in some cases they've kept these insects in one
way or another, But for the most part today we
are focusing on honey bees, giant honey bees, and stingless bees,
which have historically made up just the vast majority of
beekeeping efforts around the world. I'm thinking of the eddy
(03:14):
is oard line. If bees make honey, do earwigs make chutney?
Um Bees have been on Earth for longer than humans have.
Fossil evidence shows that flowering plants existed at least one
million years ago during the Cretaceous period, so did insects
that fed from the pollen and nectar found in those flowers.
(03:35):
The oldest fossilized bee honey is about fifty million years old.
Of course, there is no written record of this, but
based on the behavior of other primates, it is incredibly
likely that our earliest ancestors found and rated these nests
as soon as they realized that they were there. So yeah,
it's it's it's not a far logical leap that basically
(03:58):
as soon as hominids rely there is something sweet and
delicious over there that they would have figured out how
a way to get at it. And then the brood,
like the immature bees that are in the honeypoon like
they're a source of protein. There's just a lot. There's
a lot of stuff you can get out of nests
that people were clearly getting way back before recorded history.
(04:19):
Our first documentation of humans interaction with bees goes back
to rock and cave art from the Mesolithic period, and
that period started about twenty thousand years ago. This artwork
exists in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia and it shows
people in a variety of situations. The exact details vary
(04:39):
based on what kind of bees lived in a particular
area and what people did to hunt them and harvest
their nests. For example, in places where bees nest in cavities,
figures are shown on ladders next to holes surrounded by
flying insects, while others in the scene are holding things
like buckets or what maybe smokers to pacify or drive
(05:00):
away those insects. In places where giant honey bees nest
out in the open, people are climbing ladders are scaling
cliffs to get to the exposed combs. There's also a
painting at the Chata archaeological site in what is now
Turkey that dates back to about sixty d b C.
Which appears to show honeycombs with immature bees inside the cells.
(05:23):
That suggests that the people who made the art had
a lot of firsthand familiarity would bees and their nests.
There's also some Mesolithic cave art showing bees importance to
other animals. One rock painting in eastern Spain shows what
appears to be an animal's paw reaching toward a hole
that has flying insects around it, so that's most likely
(05:44):
a bear trying to get a nest of honey. And
we have evidence of some of the things that people
made using what they harvested from bees. Nests. For example,
Archaeologists have dated artifacts made using the lost wax process
to about thirty five hundred BC. These artifacts, which were
made in the region around the Dead Sea, were made
by creating a model out of bees wax and then
(06:07):
making a cast of that model using sand or clay.
The wax would burn away or be lost, which is
where it gets its name when the mold was fired,
and then molten metal would be poured into the space
in the mold. Humanity's first honey and bee hunts were
probably pretty opportunistic. People would happen upon a nest of
bees somewhere and write it, probably without a lot of
(06:29):
protection from stings or, in the case of stingless bees,
from things like bites or irritating substances that they carry
on their legs. Early opportunistic bee hunts probably also didn't
do a lot to protect the bee colony that was
being rated. People would carry away everything that they could
from the nest, and when the human population was pretty
(06:50):
small and bee colonies were really abundant, there still would
have been lots of unaffected colonies that so that the
bees themselves survived as a species. As soon societies developed
the concept of personal property and laws related to that property.
There were also laws about who owned bees. These laws
included things like the ownership of nests on a person's property,
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the ownership of swarms that hadn't yet found a new
nesting site, how nests had to be marked to show
who owned them, and punishments and restitution to be paid
if someone harmed someone else's bees or nests. And of course,
on a more general note, there are references to bees, bees, wax,
and honey all over literature all over the world, going
(07:36):
back to the earliest uses of written language. Over time,
opportunistic bee hunting and just sort of taking advantage of
bees that were already there evolved into a more intentional process,
with people methodically looking for bees and their nests instead
of basically harvesting nests as they happened to find them,
and this essentially happened everywhere on Earth that had both
(07:58):
people and honey storing bees, with the only exceptions being
in places that developed religious prohibitions against harming insects or
depriving them of their honey or their brood. The exact
steps involved in hunting bees depended on what kind of
bees lived in a particular area, but in general, people
started by watching for bees, either at water sources or
(08:20):
near flowers. In about the year fifty CE, Roman writer
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella described it this way quote, First
we must try to discover how far away they are,
and for this purpose liquid red ochre must be prepared. Then,
after touching the backs of the bees with stocks smeared
with this liquid, as they are drinking at the spring
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waiting in the same place, you will be able to
more easily recognize the bees when they return. If they
are not slow in returning, you know that they dwell
in the neighborhood. But if they are late in doing so,
you will calculate the distance by the period of their delay.
So bees obviously are small they move fast, so it
can be hard to track a bee, even for an
(09:04):
experienced bee hunter. So people also figured out ways to
make it easier to follow a bee back to the nest,
and some cultures people have physically attached something to the
bees to make them more visible, like a very fine thread,
or a piece of grass or a little bit of paper.
This idea is so charming to me, but also I'm like, man,
(09:24):
it's how challenging it must be to just attach something
to a bee while it's drinking some water. Uh. This
would both make the bee easier to see by basically
sticking a little flag on it, and then also slow
the bee down as it tried to carry this extra
weight while it flew back to the nest. People also
figured out ways to take advantage of the fact that
(09:44):
bees generally fly in a straight line when going back
to their nest, So if you collect several bees in
a portable box or trap, you can let them out
one at a time, following each bee until you lose
sight of it. Columella has more detail about how this
was done in the Roman Empire, writing quote. The joint
of a read with the knots at either end is cut,
(10:04):
and a hole board in the side of the rod
thus formed through which you should drop a little honey
or boiled down must. The rod is then placed near
a spring. Then, when a number of bees attracted by
the smell of the sweet liquid have crept into it,
the rod is taken away and the thumb placed on
the whole, and one bee only released at a time,
(10:25):
which when it has escaped, shows the line of its
flight to the observer, and he, as long as he
can keep up, follows it as it flies away. Then
when he can no longer see the bee, he lets
out another, and if it seeks the same quarter of
the heavens, he persists in following his former tracks. Otherwise,
he opens the hole and allows them to emerge one
(10:46):
after another, and marks the direction in which most of
them fly home, and pursues them until he has led
to the lurking place of the swarm. Colamela describes using
a piece of read for making this bee tracking trap,
but other cultures have used this same basic process, making
their traps out of other materials, including antler's horns and
(11:07):
crafted boxes made of something like wood or metal that
were created specifically for that purpose. Historically, people have also
observed other animals to figure out where bees might be nesting,
particularly animals like bears and honey badgers, which are also
known to be fond of honey, and in parts of
tropical Africa and Asia, there is also the honey guide bird.
(11:29):
These are birds that are fond of eating bees, wax,
and be larvae, but can't easily get into the nest
without help, so after finding a nest, the honey guide
will try to attract the attention of a mammal like
a badger or even a person. For at least five
hundred years, people in some parts of Africa, including Tanzania, Zambia,
and Mozambique have developed calls to basically let the honey
(11:52):
guides know that they are ready to go on a hunt.
And exactly what that call sounds like varies from place
to place. This uh relationship between honey guide birds and
people delights me same. It's so cool just in general,
the fact that the bird is like, I want to
get in this nest. I can't buy myself. I'm gonna
flap my wings around and make noise of something bigger.
(12:15):
So as people moved from harvesting nests that they happen
to find too intentionally searching for them, they also moved
from just harvesting the nests when they found them to
tending those nests in the wild. People have done things
like wrapping bee trees to insulate them in the winter,
keeping the nests entrances clear, enlarging a cavity where the
(12:36):
bees were nesting to make more room, or hollowing out
similar cavities nearby with the hope of attracting a swarm.
People have also improved wild nests to make it easier
to access their contents, things like adding little doors into
a tree that a person could reach into and then
close the door behind them, or building steps and ladders
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to reach nests that are in high places. Eventually, people
also started building structures specifically with the hope of attracting bees,
including in places where the bees couldn't have survived otherwise, like,
for example, building thick walled cavities at oases in the
Sahara Desert with the hope of sustaining bee colonies inside
the walls. That gets a little closer to the way
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most people think of bee keeping today, with purpose built
enclosures to house bees in a specific location, and we'll
get more into that after a sponsor break. In a
very general sense, a beehive is any man made enclosure
(13:42):
for housing bees, and people have been keeping bees in
hives for a really long time, overlapping all that be
hunting that we just talked about earlier. Uh, this possibly
goes back all the way to the very beginnings of agriculture.
Paper published in the journal Nature in described bees wax
lipid residues that were found in Neolithic pottery samples from Europe,
(14:05):
the Near East, and northern Africa, and these findings suggest
that the pots might have been used as hives, although
it's also possible that they were used to store wax
that people had harvested out in the wild. We do
know that people were keeping bees in hives in the
Nile Delta by about five thousand BC. An Ancient Egyptian
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art is full of depictions of bees and hives and beekeeping.
One relief dating back to the Fifth Dynasty, which started
around five b C, shows beekeepers at work in an apiary,
suggesting that beekeeping was well established in ancient Egypt at
that point. Honey bees also have a place in Egyptian
mythology as being transformed from the tears of the god
(14:49):
Raw after they fell to earth. The first written depiction
of a beehive in China dates back to about three
hundred BC, although the first Chinese references to honey as
medicine are ten times older than that. In Mesoamerica, people
started keeping stingless bees and hives made out of calabash
gourds somewhere between three d b c e and three
(15:11):
hundred CEES so and a lot of different parts of
the world. This goes back for thousands of years. These
first bee hives tended to be pretty simple. Most were
horizontally oriented cylinders with a small opening at one end
that was big enough for bees to pass through most
of the time, but not always. The other end had
some kind of removable covering to allow people to harvest
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from the hive, sometimes after using smoke to drive the
bees away from that end of the hive first. In
some regions, these hives were like a long, narrow pot
placed on its side, with removable covering at one end
that had a hole in the middle for the bees
to pass through. Around the world, these horizontal hives were
made using a variety of materials, hollow logs, including logs
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that had been cut from trees with the bees already
inside and then taken somewhere else, straw or grass mats
rolled into a cylinder and then covered with mud, ter, clay, pottery.
Sometimes people scored the interior of pottery cylinders with shallow
lines that were cut into the surface, both to give
the bees a roughened anchor point when they started to
(16:16):
build their honeycombs, and also to encourage them to build
those combs in a particular direction. Other hive designs followed
from these basic horizontal cylinders. Some were similar to the
ones we just described, but rectangular rather than cylindrical. Others
were vertically oriented rather than horizontal. The giant honey bees
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that are native to parts of Asia don't nest in
enclosed spaces, so in that part of the world people
attach slanted boards to trees as anchor points for honeycombs.
These are known as rafters because of their resemblance to
the rafters in the roof of a house, and it
is not just a matter of sticking them to a tree.
Beekeepers have to account for wind, sunlight, surrounding foliage more
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when selecting the exact right spot to hang a rafter.
In some places, particularly in Western Europe, people have also
kept bees in skeps that are woven from things like
straw or wicker. These look pretty much like upside down baskets,
with the open mouth resting on a flat surface and
a small opening on the side that acts as a
doorway for the bees. Especially in places where the weather
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was cool and damp, like for example, in England, skeps
were usually kept in little shelves or shelters that offered
some kind of protection from the elements. Most of the time,
a skep is harvest by lifting it up off of
that flat surface that it rests on and then removing
the contents from underneath, but some skeps also have sort
of a hinged lid up at the top. In many cases,
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harvesting these fixed comb hives involved killing the bee colony inside.
In some cases, as many bees as possible were shaken
or drummed into another hive first, but a lot of
the time the loss of the hive was just considered
part of the process. People captured swarms of bees in
the springtime, tended the hive for a season, and then
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harvested them before winter, starting that whole process over again
the following spring. Or a beekeeper might leave the hives
that seemed most likely to survive the winter unharvested, with
the hope that they would swarm and fill empty hives
in the spring. So this was one of the reasons
why people started trying to figure out ways to make
bee hives that had removable combs to try to preserve
(18:30):
more of the bee colonies. If you could easily remove
just some sections of honeycolm without damaging the others or
the hive itself, That could preserve the colony. Also, at
least in theory, such a harvesting method might also be
easier and cause less agitation for the bees, maybe leading
to fewer stings on the beekeeper. The first hives with
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removable combs were vertically oriented and opened at the top,
with a series of slats or bars placed over the
opening instead one solid lid. People had figured out that
if you left some space between each slat, the bees
would build separate combs, one per slat, and then you
could remove a slat from the hive, taking it in
the attached comb out of the hive, while leaving the
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rest of the combs untouched. One of the first written
records of a hive like this came from French doctor
Jacobspoon and English botanist George Wheeler. They were traveling together
and saw them in use in Attica Grease in sixteen
seventy five, so hundreds of years ago. Similar systems also developed,
apparently separately, in Vietnam. By the time people started developing
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hives with removable combs, they had also started developing bee
keeping garments that were meant to minimize stings. For much
of beekeeping history, people didn't really have specific bee keeping
attire in places where the bees were stingless or very gentle.
It wasn't really needed in tropical regions where people didn't
wear as much clothing. Sometimes times they removed what they
(20:01):
did wear to keep bees from being trapped in that fabric.
In other places, people may have done sturdy clothing with
long sleeves and gloves, but it really wasn't much different
from what they would wear for other work. By about
the fourteen hundreds, though, people in Europe had started making
garments specifically for working with bees, which were intended to
(20:21):
minimize the likelihood of getting stung. The details depended somewhat
on what was already fashionable in a particular place. In France,
for example, the first purpose made beekeeping garments were hoods
that covered the face with an insert that was made
of a mesh of horsehair or wire or some other
material that would offer some protection but also offer at
(20:42):
least some visibility. Because hoods were a little more common
in in terms of fashion in England, where brimmed hats
were in fashion, the first beekeeping hoods were large hats
with veils attached around that brim, and eventually the standard
outfit also evolved to include a blouse. In b Master
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John Keys published a book called The Antient b Master's Farewell,
or Full and Plain Directions for the Management of Bees
to the greatest Advantage, disclosing further improvements of the hives, boxes,
and other instruments to facilitate the operations, especially that of
separating double and trouble hives or boxes. Also brief remarks
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on sheer rock and other distinguished apiators on the continent,
deduced from a series of experiments during thirty years. Oh
How I Love a long title. It has a chapter
on b dress in which Keys advises making a hood
by attaching bolting cloth to the brim of an old hand,
with the brim cut down to two inches all the
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way around, and the cloth hanging afoot and the areas
around the nose, chin and neck reinforced with oiled linen.
He also recommends leather gloves, old stockings over the extremities,
and an apron. If you're not familiar with bolting cloth,
it's like a pretty sturdy cloth that was woven to
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allow for things like sifting with it. Keith also concludes
this chapter by saying, quote, women should not meddle with
bees without this bee dress, nor then without the addition
of a man's coat. And I almost said breaches. Also,
I don't want to tell you to dress like a man,
but it might be in your best interest. But I'm
(22:28):
not saying it. I love that quote a lot, like
I almost said almost, but maybe not. Keith's book was
just on the cusp of bee keeping as most people
might recognize it today, and we're going to get into
that after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
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Starting in about the seventeenth century, a couple of things
happened in tandem that radically changed be key being pretty
much around the world. One was the colonists started introducing
European or Western honeybees into other parts of the world
to which they were not native. Uh. This started with
the first successful introduction of European honeybees into Bermuda in
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sixteen seventeen, with those bees kept cool during the voyage
across the Atlantic to try to keep them in a
wintertime state of dormancy during the trip. The colonial introduction
of the European honeybee into other parts of the world
continued for more than two hundred years, and a lot
of places European honeybees spread really quickly, with swarms of
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bees pretty much moving ahead of the colonists. The other
was a shift in beekeeping as it was practiced with
European honey bees. Starting in the sixteen hundreds, there was
a huge focus on the idea of scientific bee keeping,
especially in Europe. Beekeepers, naturalists, entomologists, and others all wanted
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to improve a practice of beekeeping based on scientific principles,
ideally in a way that allowed beekeepers to harvest from
hives without killing the bees. During this process, beekeeping was
being informed by new scientific discoveries about bees, and science
was making new discoveries about bees thanks to bee keeping.
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One development that was part of this was the observation hive,
in other words, a hive with transparent walls that allowed
people to see the bees and their work inside. And
his fourteenth century work Life of Animals, al Zami described
an observation hive that had belonged to Aristotle. Wrote that
the bees were so annoyed by Aristotle's nosing into their
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business that they covered over the glass with Clay. Aristotle
lived in the fourth century b c. E. And this
fourteenth century reference seems to be the first account of
him having a hive like this, so that's probably not
accurate that he really did have one, but it does
mean that by the time Ald Mary was writing, at
least the idea of an observation hive existed. I love
(25:07):
the idea of bees building a privacy wall. Though by
the seventeenth century there were definitely observation hives out in
the world, thanks in part to earlier developments in glassmaking.
In sixteen fifty four, Dr John Wilkins gave an observation
hive to English gardener and diarist John Evelyn, who documented
it with a diagram. A year later, on May five,
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sixteen sixty five, Samuel Peeps wrote about seeing this hive.
Quote after dinner to Mr Evelyn's he being abroad, we
walked in his garden, and a lovely noble ground he hath, indeed,
and among other rarities, a hive of bees. So as
being hived in glass, you may see the bees making
their honey and combs mighty pleasantly. I agree with Samuel
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Peeps that it is mighty pleasant to watch the bees
through the class. It really is. Anytime I'm a science museum,
I get super excited when there is a glass bee enclosure.
I think it's oddly soothing. There's something about it that
just puts the brain at wrist. Transparent hives let people
get a much closer and more accurate look at a
lot of day to day life of bees, including their
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anatomy and their reproduction. In the eighteenth century, for example,
French inventor Renee Antoine fair schol del Remure used transparent
hives to do some really groundbreaking work about be reproduction
and the way that bees used their bodies to regulate
the hives temperature. In the late eighteenth century, Swiss entomologist
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and naturalist Francois Huber took this be observation one step
forward with what he called a leaf hive. This was
a bee hive shaped almost like a book, with each
comb in its own wooden frame and the frames on
hinges so that you could move from one page to
the next. Huber used this hive in his extensive study
of bees, which he undertook with the help of his wife,
(27:00):
his son, and his assistant France Suis Bernin, who helped
record visual observations since Hubert was blind. This leaf hive
was enormously beneficial to scientific study, but it was certainly
not practical for everyday beekeeping. But it was developed in
the middle of a two hundred year effort to create
a practical, affordable, modular bee hive for European honey bees
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that would allow easy removal and extraction of the honeycombs
with us little disruption to the lives of the bees
as possible. And there were a lot of different people
who put in the work on this between the sixteen
hundreds and the eighteen hundreds. Most of them were in England, France,
and other parts of Western Europe. As we noted earlier,
there were a whole lot of bees in the Americans
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um with this introduction of bees through colonialism, but American
beekeepers weren't really involved in this until the eighteen hundreds
because before that point there was just so much forage
available for bees it was very easy to keep be
In a lot of parts of North America, they had
been more focused on controlling wax moths that could really
destroy the hives. The person who is typically credited for
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developing the modern beehive is the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth,
who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied and built
on those earlier centuries of improvements. Langstroth based a lot
of his work on a hive developed by August Munn
in eight thirty four, which used hanging frames with space
between each frame and around each edge. Langstroth was also
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inspired by Huber's leaf hive, since it showed that the
frames could be moved without angering the bees too badly,
and Langstroth's view, the ideal hive had a lot of requirements.
It had to allow the beekeeper to perform every necessary
function of beekeeping, including the collecting honey, without killing or
injuring any bees. The beekeeper had to be able to
(28:55):
remove combs from the hive without angering the bees or
damaging the combs. The hive had to protect the bees
from the elements with adequate ventilation and a removable bottom
to allow for the removal of dead bees or other debris.
And the hive had to allow the bees to build
and just to live without being required to do any
extra work. And it also had to accommodate colonies of
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different sizes and all of the parts of this hive
that he had in mind needed to be interchangeable, so
that a beekeeper could use the same parts with different
hives as needed. And then, on top of all that
and assorted other details, Langstroth's ideal hive needed to be
combined into one cheap, simple form. Langstroth introduced his hive
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in eighteen fifty one. It used hanging frames with a
one centimeter gap between each frame and between the edge
of the frame in the interior of the hive itself.
This amount of space is also described as somewhere between
a quarter and three eights of an inch. Langstroth called
this small gap the be space. Bees needed to move
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around the hive, but they won't build their combs in
the space. The hives frames hung in a durable box
of the lid made by cabinet maker Henry Brooke Am.
The whole thing made it much easier and more efficient
for beekeepers to check on their bees and to harvest
their hives. Langstroth patented his hive in eighteen fifty two,
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and he published a book about it and about beekeeping
in eighteen fifty three. The Langstroth hive and similar hives
that were patterned after. It made bee keeping a lot
more accessible with a much larger possible honey yield, although
getting started with one did require some initial investment. It
also became a lot easier for people to use Western
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honey bees as crop pollinators. At the same time, though,
it became much easier for diseases and mites to spread
through densely populated apiaries. When colony collapse disorders started making
headlines in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousand's,
people wondered about whether the proliferation of farmed Western honey
bees was part of the problem. The spread of European
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honey bees also led to more competition with native bees
for forage. There is some conflicting data about this today.
Whether domesticated European honey bees are harmful to native bees
can depend on the conditions in a particular area, like
exactly how many domesticated bees there are, how much forage
is available, and exactly what kind of forage it is.
(31:27):
Another result of the introduction of the Langstroth hive and
the surge of beekeeping that followed was an expansion of
bee keeping as a field. People started forming bee keeping
associations they established bee keeping journals and other periodicals, and
they started bee keeping guilds. This was a lot different
from previous eras when most people who wrote about bees
(31:49):
were naturalists or philosophers or entomologists rather than people who
were specializing just in bees and bee keeping. Although the
Langstroth hive has become standard bee keeping equip in many
parts of the world, be keeping continues to develop. This
episode has been about social bees that store honey, but
starting in the nineteen fifties, people in the United States
(32:10):
and Japan figured out how to domesticate solitary leaf cutting
bees to pollinate alfalfa plants. Not all of the developments
have been positive, though. In nineteen fifty six, Brazilian agricultural
worker Warwick estevom Kerr and others were looking for a
breed of bee that might be better suited to the
American tropics than European honey bees were. They imported almost
(32:33):
fifty bee queens from Africa, which he helped a breed
with European honeybee drones. Their goal was to try to
create a breed that had a more docile temperament like
European bees do, but was more physically adapted to life
in the tropical climate like African bees. The details are
not entirely clear, but in nineteen fifty seven, the queen
(32:56):
excluders were removed from the hives that Kerr was using,
something that may have been accidental, or it may have
been someone trying to be helpful. Several of the hives
swarmed and the bees escaped into the surrounding forests. This
was the origin of what came to be known as
Africanized honey bees, which tend to be more aggressive and
territorial than their western counterpart. They have since spread northward
(33:21):
and southward through most of South America, through Central America,
and into the southwestern and southern United States. There are
so many other things that we could have discussed in
this episode, like be mythology and religious symbolism, and how
the scientific understanding of the society and evolved, and how
(33:41):
mail order package bees came to be, and other modern
beehive designs, and various writers through history who thought the
queen bee was really a king, and how gender roles
have varied among beekeepers across global societies. Um. Really, somebody
could have a whole entire podcast that was only about
beekeeping history. It is a lot and if you want
(34:04):
a lot more detail about exactly which cultures were doing
what at different types of hives and all of that,
try to get your hands on a copy of the
World History of Beekeeping and honey hunting. Um you're most
likely sourced to find. It is in a university library.
It is a textbook. It is more than seven hundred
(34:24):
pages long, and because it's a textbook, the writing is
very spare in its style. Those are seven hundred plus
pages of detail about bees, about a lot of extraneous aside.
Uh So that's our brief history of beekeeping. Do you
have listener mail? I do have listener mail. It's from
(34:45):
Liz uh and Liz says Hi, Holly and Tracy. It
wouldn't normally right in, but after listening to the poison
control episode, I thought it might brighten your day a bit.
To share my positive poison control story. I will pau
us to say, yes, this absolutely brightened my day. Uh.
The letter continues. Although I live in Toronto now, I
(35:07):
grew up in Ohio and lived in California for seventeen years.
When my now husband and I were planning our wedding,
there were some flavors we really liked from our cake baker,
but that weren't a good idea for some of our guests. Specifically,
we really liked her guinness cake, banana ganash, and peanut
butter frosting. OMG, that peanut butter frosting was so good
(35:28):
she gave me a jar of it as a gift,
possibly to shut me up about how amazing it was. However,
we had a guest who was an alcohol recovery, another
who had a severe peanut allergy, and another with a
severe banana allergy. So instead of having those flavors as
a tear in our cake, we had a separate cake
made and I had her make it look like Mr. Yuck.
(35:48):
My mom even sent me some old Mr. Yuck stickers
to give to our baker because being in California, are
baker wasn't familiar with him. Technically, it was a groom's cake,
but I liked it better than our teared k and
they both hold a special place in my heart. I've
attached to photos so that you can see just how
amazing our death cake was. Keep saying safe and I
really appreciate the episodes that aren't pandemic related. I know
(36:11):
you've both mentioned a few times that doing things unrelated
feels weird, but honestly, it's really nice to get a
small break from the stress of it. All of this
wishes Liz. Thank you so much, Liz for this email
and for the picture. UM. I love the idea of
making the cake that could be toxic to some of
your wedding guests. UM look like the symbol for Mr Yuck.
(36:38):
It's a tricky thing. And also like, thank you for
trying to make a choice for your wedding that UM
protected everyone. Having also planned a wedding in which I
needed to account for various food intolerances among guests, that
can be a tricky thing to make sure that you
have something that works for everyone. Anyway, thank you so
much for the email and for the pictures. UM. If
(37:00):
you would like to write to us about this or
anither podcast or at history podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
And then we're also all over social media at missed
in History UH. That is where you can find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcast, the iHeart Radio app and anywhere else you
get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is
(37:25):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tray Stevie Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry. I'm fond
of bees, me too. Yeah, I don't know if I've
(00:21):
mentioned that on the show before. And you know, I
spent way too much time yesterday ussuring a bee out
of my garage so I could close the door. So
this is especially timely. Yeah, you know, continuing the theme
of wanting to do some episodes that feel like they
are not catastrophically upsetting because of the state of the world.
(00:43):
I really like bees and bee keeping as you might
think of it today with square hives and the beekeeper
in the white suit with a big veiled hat. I mean,
that's a relatively recent invention, but bee keeping has a
practice has existed for thousands of years. Basically all over
the world. Every continent except Antarctica has native bee species
(01:06):
that store at least some honey in their nests, and
almost without exception, people who have lived near these bees
have developed methods to keep them and manage them, either
in their nests out in the wild, or in hives
that are made for that purpose. So this is really
a global story. It's one that has lots of pieces
that overlap and lots of different methods being practiced at
(01:28):
the same time. So, for example, if you're listening to
the episode and we're talking about methods of tracking wild
bees that are about two thousand years old, and you're thinking,
but wait, weren't people keeping bees in hives by that point?
We will get to that part two. Um. Also, we're
using the past heads for a lot of this episode
because we're talking about techniques and practices that started way
(01:49):
in the past. But in a lot of cases, these
same things, including hunting bees and keeping bees out in
the wild, like they're all they're still practiced today. They
did not go away. So most of humanities beekeeping efforts
have involved social bees that store honey in their nests.
Today that tends to be one of various subspecies of
the western or European honeybee or APIs mellifera, but there
(02:11):
are lots of other bees that also store honey and
they are part of bee keeping history to The giant
honeybee or APIs dorsada, is native to southern and Southeast Asia,
most tropical regions of the world have their own native
species of stingless bees. That name is something of a misnomer.
Most stingless bees do have stingers, but those stingers are
(02:33):
smaller and they don't usually have structures for injecting venom.
Other bees, including bumble bees, also store some honey, but
in much smaller amounts, and there are also honey storing
insects besides bees, including some species of wasps and ants.
People have harvested and used the honey and other resources
(02:53):
that all of these insects produced and store in their nests,
and in some cases they've kept these insects in one
way or another, But for the most part today we
are focusing on honey bees, giant honey bees, and stingless bees,
which have historically made up just the vast majority of
beekeeping efforts around the world. I'm thinking of the eddy
(03:14):
is oard line. If bees make honey, do earwigs make chutney?
Um Bees have been on Earth for longer than humans have.
Fossil evidence shows that flowering plants existed at least one
million years ago during the Cretaceous period, so did insects
that fed from the pollen and nectar found in those flowers.
(03:35):
The oldest fossilized bee honey is about fifty million years old.
Of course, there is no written record of this, but
based on the behavior of other primates, it is incredibly
likely that our earliest ancestors found and rated these nests
as soon as they realized that they were there. So yeah,
it's it's it's not a far logical leap that basically
(03:58):
as soon as hominids rely there is something sweet and
delicious over there that they would have figured out how
a way to get at it. And then the brood,
like the immature bees that are in the honeypoon like
they're a source of protein. There's just a lot. There's
a lot of stuff you can get out of nests
that people were clearly getting way back before recorded history.
(04:19):
Our first documentation of humans interaction with bees goes back
to rock and cave art from the Mesolithic period, and
that period started about twenty thousand years ago. This artwork
exists in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia and it shows
people in a variety of situations. The exact details vary
(04:39):
based on what kind of bees lived in a particular
area and what people did to hunt them and harvest
their nests. For example, in places where bees nest in cavities,
figures are shown on ladders next to holes surrounded by
flying insects, while others in the scene are holding things
like buckets or what maybe smokers to pacify or drive
(05:00):
away those insects. In places where giant honey bees nest
out in the open, people are climbing ladders are scaling
cliffs to get to the exposed combs. There's also a
painting at the Chata archaeological site in what is now
Turkey that dates back to about sixty d b C.
Which appears to show honeycombs with immature bees inside the cells.
(05:23):
That suggests that the people who made the art had
a lot of firsthand familiarity would bees and their nests.
There's also some Mesolithic cave art showing bees importance to
other animals. One rock painting in eastern Spain shows what
appears to be an animal's paw reaching toward a hole
that has flying insects around it, so that's most likely
(05:44):
a bear trying to get a nest of honey. And
we have evidence of some of the things that people
made using what they harvested from bees. Nests. For example,
Archaeologists have dated artifacts made using the lost wax process
to about thirty five hundred BC. These artifacts, which were
made in the region around the Dead Sea, were made
by creating a model out of bees wax and then
(06:07):
making a cast of that model using sand or clay.
The wax would burn away or be lost, which is
where it gets its name when the mold was fired,
and then molten metal would be poured into the space
in the mold. Humanity's first honey and bee hunts were
probably pretty opportunistic. People would happen upon a nest of
bees somewhere and write it, probably without a lot of
(06:29):
protection from stings or, in the case of stingless bees,
from things like bites or irritating substances that they carry
on their legs. Early opportunistic bee hunts probably also didn't
do a lot to protect the bee colony that was
being rated. People would carry away everything that they could
from the nest, and when the human population was pretty
(06:50):
small and bee colonies were really abundant, there still would
have been lots of unaffected colonies that so that the
bees themselves survived as a species. As soon societies developed
the concept of personal property and laws related to that property.
There were also laws about who owned bees. These laws
included things like the ownership of nests on a person's property,
(07:13):
the ownership of swarms that hadn't yet found a new
nesting site, how nests had to be marked to show
who owned them, and punishments and restitution to be paid
if someone harmed someone else's bees or nests. And of course,
on a more general note, there are references to bees, bees, wax,
and honey all over literature all over the world, going
(07:36):
back to the earliest uses of written language. Over time,
opportunistic bee hunting and just sort of taking advantage of
bees that were already there evolved into a more intentional process,
with people methodically looking for bees and their nests instead
of basically harvesting nests as they happened to find them,
and this essentially happened everywhere on Earth that had both
(07:58):
people and honey storing bees, with the only exceptions being
in places that developed religious prohibitions against harming insects or
depriving them of their honey or their brood. The exact
steps involved in hunting bees depended on what kind of
bees lived in a particular area, but in general, people
started by watching for bees, either at water sources or
(08:20):
near flowers. In about the year fifty CE, Roman writer
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella described it this way quote, First
we must try to discover how far away they are,
and for this purpose liquid red ochre must be prepared. Then,
after touching the backs of the bees with stocks smeared
with this liquid, as they are drinking at the spring
(08:42):
waiting in the same place, you will be able to
more easily recognize the bees when they return. If they
are not slow in returning, you know that they dwell
in the neighborhood. But if they are late in doing so,
you will calculate the distance by the period of their delay.
So bees obviously are small they move fast, so it
can be hard to track a bee, even for an
(09:04):
experienced bee hunter. So people also figured out ways to
make it easier to follow a bee back to the nest,
and some cultures people have physically attached something to the
bees to make them more visible, like a very fine thread,
or a piece of grass or a little bit of paper.
This idea is so charming to me, but also I'm like, man,
(09:24):
it's how challenging it must be to just attach something
to a bee while it's drinking some water. Uh. This
would both make the bee easier to see by basically
sticking a little flag on it, and then also slow
the bee down as it tried to carry this extra
weight while it flew back to the nest. People also
figured out ways to take advantage of the fact that
(09:44):
bees generally fly in a straight line when going back
to their nest, So if you collect several bees in
a portable box or trap, you can let them out
one at a time, following each bee until you lose
sight of it. Columella has more detail about how this
was done in the Roman Empire, writing quote. The joint
of a read with the knots at either end is cut,
(10:04):
and a hole board in the side of the rod
thus formed through which you should drop a little honey
or boiled down must. The rod is then placed near
a spring. Then, when a number of bees attracted by
the smell of the sweet liquid have crept into it,
the rod is taken away and the thumb placed on
the whole, and one bee only released at a time,
(10:25):
which when it has escaped, shows the line of its
flight to the observer, and he, as long as he
can keep up, follows it as it flies away. Then
when he can no longer see the bee, he lets
out another, and if it seeks the same quarter of
the heavens, he persists in following his former tracks. Otherwise,
he opens the hole and allows them to emerge one
(10:46):
after another, and marks the direction in which most of
them fly home, and pursues them until he has led
to the lurking place of the swarm. Colamela describes using
a piece of read for making this bee tracking trap,
but other cultures have used this same basic process, making
their traps out of other materials, including antler's horns and
(11:07):
crafted boxes made of something like wood or metal that
were created specifically for that purpose. Historically, people have also
observed other animals to figure out where bees might be nesting,
particularly animals like bears and honey badgers, which are also
known to be fond of honey, and in parts of
tropical Africa and Asia, there is also the honey guide bird.
(11:29):
These are birds that are fond of eating bees, wax,
and be larvae, but can't easily get into the nest
without help, so after finding a nest, the honey guide
will try to attract the attention of a mammal like
a badger or even a person. For at least five
hundred years, people in some parts of Africa, including Tanzania, Zambia,
and Mozambique have developed calls to basically let the honey
(11:52):
guides know that they are ready to go on a hunt.
And exactly what that call sounds like varies from place
to place. This uh relationship between honey guide birds and
people delights me same. It's so cool just in general,
the fact that the bird is like, I want to
get in this nest. I can't buy myself. I'm gonna
flap my wings around and make noise of something bigger.
(12:15):
So as people moved from harvesting nests that they happen
to find too intentionally searching for them, they also moved
from just harvesting the nests when they found them to
tending those nests in the wild. People have done things
like wrapping bee trees to insulate them in the winter,
keeping the nests entrances clear, enlarging a cavity where the
(12:36):
bees were nesting to make more room, or hollowing out
similar cavities nearby with the hope of attracting a swarm.
People have also improved wild nests to make it easier
to access their contents, things like adding little doors into
a tree that a person could reach into and then
close the door behind them, or building steps and ladders
(12:57):
to reach nests that are in high places. Eventually, people
also started building structures specifically with the hope of attracting bees,
including in places where the bees couldn't have survived otherwise, like,
for example, building thick walled cavities at oases in the
Sahara Desert with the hope of sustaining bee colonies inside
the walls. That gets a little closer to the way
(13:20):
most people think of bee keeping today, with purpose built
enclosures to house bees in a specific location, and we'll
get more into that after a sponsor break. In a
very general sense, a beehive is any man made enclosure
(13:42):
for housing bees, and people have been keeping bees in
hives for a really long time, overlapping all that be
hunting that we just talked about earlier. Uh, this possibly
goes back all the way to the very beginnings of agriculture.
Paper published in the journal Nature in described bees wax
lipid residues that were found in Neolithic pottery samples from Europe,
(14:05):
the Near East, and northern Africa, and these findings suggest
that the pots might have been used as hives, although
it's also possible that they were used to store wax
that people had harvested out in the wild. We do
know that people were keeping bees in hives in the
Nile Delta by about five thousand BC. An Ancient Egyptian
(14:26):
art is full of depictions of bees and hives and beekeeping.
One relief dating back to the Fifth Dynasty, which started
around five b C, shows beekeepers at work in an apiary,
suggesting that beekeeping was well established in ancient Egypt at
that point. Honey bees also have a place in Egyptian
mythology as being transformed from the tears of the god
(14:49):
Raw after they fell to earth. The first written depiction
of a beehive in China dates back to about three
hundred BC, although the first Chinese references to honey as
medicine are ten times older than that. In Mesoamerica, people
started keeping stingless bees and hives made out of calabash
gourds somewhere between three d b c e and three
(15:11):
hundred CEES so and a lot of different parts of
the world. This goes back for thousands of years. These
first bee hives tended to be pretty simple. Most were
horizontally oriented cylinders with a small opening at one end
that was big enough for bees to pass through most
of the time, but not always. The other end had
some kind of removable covering to allow people to harvest
(15:32):
from the hive, sometimes after using smoke to drive the
bees away from that end of the hive first. In
some regions, these hives were like a long, narrow pot
placed on its side, with removable covering at one end
that had a hole in the middle for the bees
to pass through. Around the world, these horizontal hives were
made using a variety of materials, hollow logs, including logs
(15:55):
that had been cut from trees with the bees already
inside and then taken somewhere else, straw or grass mats
rolled into a cylinder and then covered with mud, ter, clay, pottery.
Sometimes people scored the interior of pottery cylinders with shallow
lines that were cut into the surface, both to give
the bees a roughened anchor point when they started to
(16:16):
build their honeycombs, and also to encourage them to build
those combs in a particular direction. Other hive designs followed
from these basic horizontal cylinders. Some were similar to the
ones we just described, but rectangular rather than cylindrical. Others
were vertically oriented rather than horizontal. The giant honey bees
(16:37):
that are native to parts of Asia don't nest in
enclosed spaces, so in that part of the world people
attach slanted boards to trees as anchor points for honeycombs.
These are known as rafters because of their resemblance to
the rafters in the roof of a house, and it
is not just a matter of sticking them to a tree.
Beekeepers have to account for wind, sunlight, surrounding foliage more
(17:00):
when selecting the exact right spot to hang a rafter.
In some places, particularly in Western Europe, people have also
kept bees in skeps that are woven from things like
straw or wicker. These look pretty much like upside down baskets,
with the open mouth resting on a flat surface and
a small opening on the side that acts as a
doorway for the bees. Especially in places where the weather
(17:23):
was cool and damp, like for example, in England, skeps
were usually kept in little shelves or shelters that offered
some kind of protection from the elements. Most of the time,
a skep is harvest by lifting it up off of
that flat surface that it rests on and then removing
the contents from underneath, but some skeps also have sort
of a hinged lid up at the top. In many cases,
(17:45):
harvesting these fixed comb hives involved killing the bee colony inside.
In some cases, as many bees as possible were shaken
or drummed into another hive first, but a lot of
the time the loss of the hive was just considered
part of the process. People captured swarms of bees in
the springtime, tended the hive for a season, and then
(18:06):
harvested them before winter, starting that whole process over again
the following spring. Or a beekeeper might leave the hives
that seemed most likely to survive the winter unharvested, with
the hope that they would swarm and fill empty hives
in the spring. So this was one of the reasons
why people started trying to figure out ways to make
bee hives that had removable combs to try to preserve
(18:30):
more of the bee colonies. If you could easily remove
just some sections of honeycolm without damaging the others or
the hive itself, That could preserve the colony. Also, at
least in theory, such a harvesting method might also be
easier and cause less agitation for the bees, maybe leading
to fewer stings on the beekeeper. The first hives with
(18:52):
removable combs were vertically oriented and opened at the top,
with a series of slats or bars placed over the
opening instead one solid lid. People had figured out that
if you left some space between each slat, the bees
would build separate combs, one per slat, and then you
could remove a slat from the hive, taking it in
the attached comb out of the hive, while leaving the
(19:15):
rest of the combs untouched. One of the first written
records of a hive like this came from French doctor
Jacobspoon and English botanist George Wheeler. They were traveling together
and saw them in use in Attica Grease in sixteen
seventy five, so hundreds of years ago. Similar systems also developed,
apparently separately, in Vietnam. By the time people started developing
(19:38):
hives with removable combs, they had also started developing bee
keeping garments that were meant to minimize stings. For much
of beekeeping history, people didn't really have specific bee keeping
attire in places where the bees were stingless or very gentle.
It wasn't really needed in tropical regions where people didn't
wear as much clothing. Sometimes times they removed what they
(20:01):
did wear to keep bees from being trapped in that fabric.
In other places, people may have done sturdy clothing with
long sleeves and gloves, but it really wasn't much different
from what they would wear for other work. By about
the fourteen hundreds, though, people in Europe had started making
garments specifically for working with bees, which were intended to
(20:21):
minimize the likelihood of getting stung. The details depended somewhat
on what was already fashionable in a particular place. In France,
for example, the first purpose made beekeeping garments were hoods
that covered the face with an insert that was made
of a mesh of horsehair or wire or some other
material that would offer some protection but also offer at
(20:42):
least some visibility. Because hoods were a little more common
in in terms of fashion in England, where brimmed hats
were in fashion, the first beekeeping hoods were large hats
with veils attached around that brim, and eventually the standard
outfit also evolved to include a blouse. In b Master
(21:04):
John Keys published a book called The Antient b Master's Farewell,
or Full and Plain Directions for the Management of Bees
to the greatest Advantage, disclosing further improvements of the hives, boxes,
and other instruments to facilitate the operations, especially that of
separating double and trouble hives or boxes. Also brief remarks
(21:25):
on sheer rock and other distinguished apiators on the continent,
deduced from a series of experiments during thirty years. Oh
How I Love a long title. It has a chapter
on b dress in which Keys advises making a hood
by attaching bolting cloth to the brim of an old hand,
with the brim cut down to two inches all the
(21:47):
way around, and the cloth hanging afoot and the areas
around the nose, chin and neck reinforced with oiled linen.
He also recommends leather gloves, old stockings over the extremities,
and an apron. If you're not familiar with bolting cloth,
it's like a pretty sturdy cloth that was woven to
(22:07):
allow for things like sifting with it. Keith also concludes
this chapter by saying, quote, women should not meddle with
bees without this bee dress, nor then without the addition
of a man's coat. And I almost said breaches. Also,
I don't want to tell you to dress like a man,
but it might be in your best interest. But I'm
(22:28):
not saying it. I love that quote a lot, like
I almost said almost, but maybe not. Keith's book was
just on the cusp of bee keeping as most people
might recognize it today, and we're going to get into
that after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
(22:53):
Starting in about the seventeenth century, a couple of things
happened in tandem that radically changed be key being pretty
much around the world. One was the colonists started introducing
European or Western honeybees into other parts of the world
to which they were not native. Uh. This started with
the first successful introduction of European honeybees into Bermuda in
(23:17):
sixteen seventeen, with those bees kept cool during the voyage
across the Atlantic to try to keep them in a
wintertime state of dormancy during the trip. The colonial introduction
of the European honeybee into other parts of the world
continued for more than two hundred years, and a lot
of places European honeybees spread really quickly, with swarms of
(23:38):
bees pretty much moving ahead of the colonists. The other
was a shift in beekeeping as it was practiced with
European honey bees. Starting in the sixteen hundreds, there was
a huge focus on the idea of scientific bee keeping,
especially in Europe. Beekeepers, naturalists, entomologists, and others all wanted
(23:59):
to improve a practice of beekeeping based on scientific principles,
ideally in a way that allowed beekeepers to harvest from
hives without killing the bees. During this process, beekeeping was
being informed by new scientific discoveries about bees, and science
was making new discoveries about bees thanks to bee keeping.
(24:19):
One development that was part of this was the observation hive,
in other words, a hive with transparent walls that allowed
people to see the bees and their work inside. And
his fourteenth century work Life of Animals, al Zami described
an observation hive that had belonged to Aristotle. Wrote that
the bees were so annoyed by Aristotle's nosing into their
(24:42):
business that they covered over the glass with Clay. Aristotle
lived in the fourth century b c. E. And this
fourteenth century reference seems to be the first account of
him having a hive like this, so that's probably not
accurate that he really did have one, but it does
mean that by the time Ald Mary was writing, at
least the idea of an observation hive existed. I love
(25:07):
the idea of bees building a privacy wall. Though by
the seventeenth century there were definitely observation hives out in
the world, thanks in part to earlier developments in glassmaking.
In sixteen fifty four, Dr John Wilkins gave an observation
hive to English gardener and diarist John Evelyn, who documented
it with a diagram. A year later, on May five,
(25:30):
sixteen sixty five, Samuel Peeps wrote about seeing this hive.
Quote after dinner to Mr Evelyn's he being abroad, we
walked in his garden, and a lovely noble ground he hath, indeed,
and among other rarities, a hive of bees. So as
being hived in glass, you may see the bees making
their honey and combs mighty pleasantly. I agree with Samuel
(25:53):
Peeps that it is mighty pleasant to watch the bees
through the class. It really is. Anytime I'm a science museum,
I get super excited when there is a glass bee enclosure.
I think it's oddly soothing. There's something about it that
just puts the brain at wrist. Transparent hives let people
get a much closer and more accurate look at a
lot of day to day life of bees, including their
(26:16):
anatomy and their reproduction. In the eighteenth century, for example,
French inventor Renee Antoine fair schol del Remure used transparent
hives to do some really groundbreaking work about be reproduction
and the way that bees used their bodies to regulate
the hives temperature. In the late eighteenth century, Swiss entomologist
(26:37):
and naturalist Francois Huber took this be observation one step
forward with what he called a leaf hive. This was
a bee hive shaped almost like a book, with each
comb in its own wooden frame and the frames on
hinges so that you could move from one page to
the next. Huber used this hive in his extensive study
of bees, which he undertook with the help of his wife,
(27:00):
his son, and his assistant France Suis Bernin, who helped
record visual observations since Hubert was blind. This leaf hive
was enormously beneficial to scientific study, but it was certainly
not practical for everyday beekeeping. But it was developed in
the middle of a two hundred year effort to create
a practical, affordable, modular bee hive for European honey bees
(27:25):
that would allow easy removal and extraction of the honeycombs
with us little disruption to the lives of the bees
as possible. And there were a lot of different people
who put in the work on this between the sixteen
hundreds and the eighteen hundreds. Most of them were in England, France,
and other parts of Western Europe. As we noted earlier,
there were a whole lot of bees in the Americans
(27:47):
um with this introduction of bees through colonialism, but American
beekeepers weren't really involved in this until the eighteen hundreds
because before that point there was just so much forage
available for bees it was very easy to keep be
In a lot of parts of North America, they had
been more focused on controlling wax moths that could really
destroy the hives. The person who is typically credited for
(28:09):
developing the modern beehive is the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth,
who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied and built
on those earlier centuries of improvements. Langstroth based a lot
of his work on a hive developed by August Munn
in eight thirty four, which used hanging frames with space
between each frame and around each edge. Langstroth was also
(28:32):
inspired by Huber's leaf hive, since it showed that the
frames could be moved without angering the bees too badly,
and Langstroth's view, the ideal hive had a lot of requirements.
It had to allow the beekeeper to perform every necessary
function of beekeeping, including the collecting honey, without killing or
injuring any bees. The beekeeper had to be able to
(28:55):
remove combs from the hive without angering the bees or
damaging the combs. The hive had to protect the bees
from the elements with adequate ventilation and a removable bottom
to allow for the removal of dead bees or other debris.
And the hive had to allow the bees to build
and just to live without being required to do any
extra work. And it also had to accommodate colonies of
(29:17):
different sizes and all of the parts of this hive
that he had in mind needed to be interchangeable, so
that a beekeeper could use the same parts with different
hives as needed. And then, on top of all that
and assorted other details, Langstroth's ideal hive needed to be
combined into one cheap, simple form. Langstroth introduced his hive
(29:39):
in eighteen fifty one. It used hanging frames with a
one centimeter gap between each frame and between the edge
of the frame in the interior of the hive itself.
This amount of space is also described as somewhere between
a quarter and three eights of an inch. Langstroth called
this small gap the be space. Bees needed to move
(29:59):
around the hive, but they won't build their combs in
the space. The hives frames hung in a durable box
of the lid made by cabinet maker Henry Brooke Am.
The whole thing made it much easier and more efficient
for beekeepers to check on their bees and to harvest
their hives. Langstroth patented his hive in eighteen fifty two,
(30:19):
and he published a book about it and about beekeeping
in eighteen fifty three. The Langstroth hive and similar hives
that were patterned after. It made bee keeping a lot
more accessible with a much larger possible honey yield, although
getting started with one did require some initial investment. It
also became a lot easier for people to use Western
(30:41):
honey bees as crop pollinators. At the same time, though,
it became much easier for diseases and mites to spread
through densely populated apiaries. When colony collapse disorders started making
headlines in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousand's,
people wondered about whether the proliferation of farmed Western honey
bees was part of the problem. The spread of European
(31:05):
honey bees also led to more competition with native bees
for forage. There is some conflicting data about this today.
Whether domesticated European honey bees are harmful to native bees
can depend on the conditions in a particular area, like
exactly how many domesticated bees there are, how much forage
is available, and exactly what kind of forage it is.
(31:27):
Another result of the introduction of the Langstroth hive and
the surge of beekeeping that followed was an expansion of
bee keeping as a field. People started forming bee keeping
associations they established bee keeping journals and other periodicals, and
they started bee keeping guilds. This was a lot different
from previous eras when most people who wrote about bees
(31:49):
were naturalists or philosophers or entomologists rather than people who
were specializing just in bees and bee keeping. Although the
Langstroth hive has become standard bee keeping equip in many
parts of the world, be keeping continues to develop. This
episode has been about social bees that store honey, but
starting in the nineteen fifties, people in the United States
(32:10):
and Japan figured out how to domesticate solitary leaf cutting
bees to pollinate alfalfa plants. Not all of the developments
have been positive, though. In nineteen fifty six, Brazilian agricultural
worker Warwick estevom Kerr and others were looking for a
breed of bee that might be better suited to the
American tropics than European honey bees were. They imported almost
(32:33):
fifty bee queens from Africa, which he helped a breed
with European honeybee drones. Their goal was to try to
create a breed that had a more docile temperament like
European bees do, but was more physically adapted to life
in the tropical climate like African bees. The details are
not entirely clear, but in nineteen fifty seven, the queen
(32:56):
excluders were removed from the hives that Kerr was using,
something that may have been accidental, or it may have
been someone trying to be helpful. Several of the hives
swarmed and the bees escaped into the surrounding forests. This
was the origin of what came to be known as
Africanized honey bees, which tend to be more aggressive and
territorial than their western counterpart. They have since spread northward
(33:21):
and southward through most of South America, through Central America,
and into the southwestern and southern United States. There are
so many other things that we could have discussed in
this episode, like be mythology and religious symbolism, and how
the scientific understanding of the society and evolved, and how
(33:41):
mail order package bees came to be, and other modern
beehive designs, and various writers through history who thought the
queen bee was really a king, and how gender roles
have varied among beekeepers across global societies. Um. Really, somebody
could have a whole entire podcast that was only about
beekeeping history. It is a lot and if you want
(34:04):
a lot more detail about exactly which cultures were doing
what at different types of hives and all of that,
try to get your hands on a copy of the
World History of Beekeeping and honey hunting. Um you're most
likely sourced to find. It is in a university library.
It is a textbook. It is more than seven hundred
(34:24):
pages long, and because it's a textbook, the writing is
very spare in its style. Those are seven hundred plus
pages of detail about bees, about a lot of extraneous aside.
Uh So that's our brief history of beekeeping. Do you
have listener mail? I do have listener mail. It's from
(34:45):
Liz uh and Liz says Hi, Holly and Tracy. It
wouldn't normally right in, but after listening to the poison
control episode, I thought it might brighten your day a bit.
To share my positive poison control story. I will pau
us to say, yes, this absolutely brightened my day. Uh.
The letter continues. Although I live in Toronto now, I
(35:07):
grew up in Ohio and lived in California for seventeen years.
When my now husband and I were planning our wedding,
there were some flavors we really liked from our cake baker,
but that weren't a good idea for some of our guests. Specifically,
we really liked her guinness cake, banana ganash, and peanut
butter frosting. OMG, that peanut butter frosting was so good
(35:28):
she gave me a jar of it as a gift,
possibly to shut me up about how amazing it was. However,
we had a guest who was an alcohol recovery, another
who had a severe peanut allergy, and another with a
severe banana allergy. So instead of having those flavors as
a tear in our cake, we had a separate cake
made and I had her make it look like Mr. Yuck.
(35:48):
My mom even sent me some old Mr. Yuck stickers
to give to our baker because being in California, are
baker wasn't familiar with him. Technically, it was a groom's cake,
but I liked it better than our teared k and
they both hold a special place in my heart. I've
attached to photos so that you can see just how
amazing our death cake was. Keep saying safe and I
really appreciate the episodes that aren't pandemic related. I know
(36:11):
you've both mentioned a few times that doing things unrelated
feels weird, but honestly, it's really nice to get a
small break from the stress of it. All of this
wishes Liz. Thank you so much, Liz for this email
and for the picture. UM. I love the idea of
making the cake that could be toxic to some of
your wedding guests. UM look like the symbol for Mr Yuck.
(36:38):
It's a tricky thing. And also like, thank you for
trying to make a choice for your wedding that UM
protected everyone. Having also planned a wedding in which I
needed to account for various food intolerances among guests, that
can be a tricky thing to make sure that you
have something that works for everyone. Anyway, thank you so
much for the email and for the pictures. UM. If
(37:00):
you would like to write to us about this or
anither podcast or at history podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
And then we're also all over social media at missed
in History UH. That is where you can find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
Apple podcast, the iHeart Radio app and anywhere else you
get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is
(37:25):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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