July 13, 2024 • 36 mins
This 2020 episode covers the path of beekeeping from its global origins thousands of years ago to modern square hives and beekeepers in white suits and big veiled hats.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since we got a little bit about beekeeping
in this week's installment of Unearthed, we're revisiting our episode
on the history of beekeeping today. This episode traces the
history of beekeeping up through the development of the Langstroth
hive in the nineteenth century. But to be clear, the
beekeeping and bee hunting methods that we talk about in
(00:23):
the earlier parts of the episode are still practiced today
all around the world. This episode originally came out on
May eleventh, twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome
(00:47):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
I'm fond of bees, me too. Yeah, I don't know
if I've mentioned that on the show before. I don't know.
I spent way too much time, Yes, Dad ushering a
bee out of my garage so I could close the door.
So this is especially timely. Yeah, you know, continuing the
(01:08):
theme of wanting to do some episodes that feel like
they are not catastrophically upsetting because of the state of
the world. I really like bees and beekeeping 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 beekeeping has
(01:32):
a practice has existed for thousands of years. Basically all
over the world. Every continent except Antarctica has native bee
species 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
(01:52):
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 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
(02:14):
by that point. We will get to that part two. Also,
we're using the past tense for a lot of this
episode because we're talking about techniques and practices that started
way 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 practice today.
They did not go away. So most of humanity's beekeeping
(02:34):
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 melifera, but there
are lots of other bees that also store honey, and
they are part of beekeeping history too. The giant honeybee
or APIs dorsata, is native to southern and Southeast Asia.
(02:56):
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
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
(03:19):
insects besides bees, including some species of wasps and ants.
People have harvested and used the honey and other resources
that all of these insects produce 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 honeybees, giant honey bees, and stingless bees,
(03:40):
which have historically made up just the vast majority of
bee keeping efforts around the world. I'm thinking of the
eddyizard line. If bees make honey, do earwigs make chutney?
Bees have been on earth for longer than humans have.
Fossil evidence shows that flowering plants existed at least least
one hundred million years ago during their Cretaceous period, so
(04:04):
did insects that fed from the pollen and nectar found
in those flowers. 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
raided these nests as soon as they realized that they
(04:26):
were there. So yeah, it's it's not a far logical
leap that basically as soon as hominids were like 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 honeycomb, like they're a source of protein. There's
a lot of stuff you can get out of nests
(04:48):
that people were clearly getting way back before recorded history.
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
(05:09):
people in a variety of situations. The exact details vary
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
(05:30):
like buckets or what may be smokers to pacify or
drive away those insects. In places where giant honey bees
nest out in the open, people are climbing ladders or
scaling cliffs to get to the exposed combs. There's also
a painting at the Chatakuk Archaeological site in what is
now Turkey that dates back to about sixty six hundred
(05:51):
BCE which appears to show honeycombs with immature bees inside
the cells that suggests that the people who made the
art have a lot of first hand familiarity with bees
and their nests. There's also some Mesolithic cave art showing
bee's importance to other animals. One rock painting in eastern
Spain shows what appears to be an animal's paw reaching
(06:14):
toward a hole that has flying insects around it, so
that's most likely a bear trying to get it 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 BCE.
(06:34):
These artifacts, which were made in the region around the
Dead Sea, were made by creating a model out of
beeswax and then 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
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hunts were probably pretty opportunistic. People would happen upon a
nest of bees somewhere and rate it, probably without a
lot of 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
(07:17):
that was being rated. People would carry away everything that
they could from the nest, and when the human population
was pretty small and bee colonies were really abundant, there
still would have been lots of unaffected colonies so that
the bees themselves survived as a species. As soon as
societies developed the concept of personal property and laws related
(07:38):
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, 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.
(08:01):
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 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
(08:23):
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 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
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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 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
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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 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
(09:28):
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 experienced bee hunter.
So people also figured out ways to make it easier
to follow a bee back to the nest. In some cultures,
people have physically attached something to the bees to make
them more visible, like a very fine thread, or a
(09:51):
piece of grass or a little bit of paper. This
idea is so charming to me, but also I'm like, man,
how challenging it must be to just attack something to
a bee while it's drinking some water. 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
(10:13):
it flew back to the nest. People also figured out
ways to take advantage of the fact that 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. Kalumela
has more detail about how this was done in the
(10:33):
Roman Empire writing quote, the joint of a reed with
the knots at either end, is cut, and a hole
bored 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
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away and the thumb placed on the whole, and one
bee only released at a time, 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
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his former tracks. Otherwise, he opens the hole and allows
them to emerge one after another, and marks the direction
in which most of them fly home, and pursues them
until he is led to the lurking place of the swarm.
Kalamela describes using a piece of reed for making this
bee tracking trap, but other cultures have used this same
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basic process, making their traps out of other materials, including antlers, horns,
and 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
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parts of tropical Appa and Asia, there is also the
honeyguide bird. These are birds that are fond of eating beeswax,
and bee larvae, but can't easily get into the nest
without help, so after finding a nest, the honeyguide 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
(12:22):
Mozambique have developed calls to basically let the honey guides
know that they are ready to go on a hunt.
And exactly what that call sounds like varies from place
to place. That's a relationship between honeyguide birds and people.
Delights me. Oh same, It's so cool just in general.
The fact that the bird was like, I want to
get in this nest. I can't by myself. I'm gonna
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flap my wings around and make noise attention of something bigger.
So as people moved from harvesting nests that they happen
to find to intentionally searching for them, they also move
from just harvesting the nests when they found them to
ten those nests in the wild. People have done things
like wrapping bee trees to insulate them in the winter,
(13:06):
keeping the nests entrances clear, enlarging a cavity where the
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
(13:28):
close the door behind them, or building steps and ladders
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
(13:51):
the walls. That gets a little closer to the way
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
(14:14):
very general sense, a beehive is any man made enclosure
for housing bees, and people have been keeping bees in
hives for a really long time, overlapping all that bee
hunting that we just talked about earlier. This possibly goes
back all the way to the very beginnings of agriculture.
A paper published in the journal Nature in twenty sixteen
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describes bees wax lipid residues that were found in Neolithic
pottery samples from Europe, 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
(14:56):
in hives in the Nile Delta by about five thousand
bees An ancient Egyptian art is full of depictions of
bees and hives and beekeeping. One relief dating back to
the Fifth Dynasty, which started around twenty four to sixty
five BCE, shows beekeepers at work in an apiary, suggesting
that beekeeping was well established in ancient Egypt at that point.
(15:19):
Honey bees also have a place in Egyptian mythology as
being transformed from the tears of the god Raw after
they fell to earth. The first written depiction of a
beehive in China dates back to about three hundred BCE,
although the first Chinese references to honey as medicine are
ten times older than that. In Mesoamerica, people started keeping
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stingless bees in hives made out of calabash gourds somewhere
between three hundred BCE and three hundred cees, so in
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
(16:03):
not always. The other end had some kind of removable
covering to allow people to harvest 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 a removable covering at one end that had a
hole in the middle for the bees to pass through.
(16:24):
Around the world, these horizontal hives were made using a
variety of materials. Hollow logs, including logs 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 or clay pottery. Sometimes
people scored the interior of pottery cylinders with shallow lines
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that were cut into the surface, both to give the
bees a roughened anchor point when they started to 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
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vertically oriented rather than horizontal. The giant honey bees 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
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just a matter of sticking them to a tree. Beekeepers
have to account for wind, sunlight, surrounding foliage, and more
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,
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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
was cool and damp, like for example, in England, steps
were usually kept in little shelves or shelters that offered
some kind of protection from the elements. Most of the
time a skeep is harvest by lifting it up off
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of that flat surface that it rests on and then
removing the contents from underneath, but some steps also have
sort of a hinged lid up at the top. In
many cases, 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
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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 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,
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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 colmbs to try to
preserve more of the bee colonies. If you could easily
remove just some sections of honeycomb without damaging the others
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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 removable combs were vertically oriented and opened at the top,
with a series of slats or bars placed over the
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opening instead of 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 rest of the combs untouched. One of the first
written records of a hive like this came from French
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doctor Jacob Spon and English botan George Wheeler. They were
traveling together and saw them in use in Attica, Greece
in sixteen seventy five, so hundreds of years ago. Similar
systems also developed, apparently separately, in Vietnam. By the time
people started developing hives with removable combs, they had also
started developing beekeeping garments that were meant to minimize stings.
(20:21):
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 they removed
what they did wear to keep bees from being trapped
in that fabric. In other places, people may have done
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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 minimize the likelihood of getting stung. The details
depended somewhat on what was already fashionable in a particular place.
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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 least some visibility. Was because hoods were a
little more common in terms of fashion in England, where
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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
seventeen ninety six, bee master John Keyes published a book
called The Antient Bee Master's Farewell or Full and Plane
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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 on Shirach and
other distinguished apiators on the continent. Deduced from a series
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of experiments during thirty years. Oh how I love a
long title. HU. It has a chapter on bee dress
in which Keys advises making a hood by attaching bolting
cloth to the brim of an old hat, with the
brim cut down to two inches all the way around
and the cloth hanging a foot in the areas around
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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 allow
for things like sifting with it. Keys also concludes this
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chapter by saying, quote, women should not meddle with bees
without this bee dress, nor than without the addition of
a man's coat. And I almost said breeches. Also, I
don't want it tell you to dress like a man,
but it might be in your best interest, but I'm
not saying it. I love that quote a lot, like
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I almost said breaching, almost, but maybe not. Keith's book
was just on the cusp of beekeeping 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 beekeeping pretty much around
the world. One was that colonists started introducing European or
Western honeybees into other parts of the world to which
they were not native. This started with the first successful
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introduction of European honeybees into Bermuda in sixteen seventeen, with
those bees kept cool during the voyage across the Atlantic
to try to keep them in a way intertime 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
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European honeybees spread really quickly, with swarms of bees pretty
much moving ahead of the colonists. The other was a
shift in beekeeping as it was practiced with European honeybees.
Starting in the sixteen hundreds, there was a huge focus
on the idea of scientific beekeeping, especially in Europe. Beekeepers, naturalists, entomologists,
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and others all wanted to improve the 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
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thanks to beekeeping. One development that was part of this
was the observation high, 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 Damiri described an observation hive that had belonged to Aristotle.
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Wrote that the bees were so annoyed by Aristotle's nosing
into their business that they covered over the glass with clay.
Aristotle lived in the fourth century BCE, 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
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that by the time al Damiri was writing, at least
the idea of an observation hive existed. I love the
idea of bees building a privacy wall, though, yea. 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, doctor John Wilkins gave an observation
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high to English gardener and diarist John Evelyn, who documented
it with a diagram. A year later. On May fifth,
sixteen sixty five, Samuel Peeps wrote about seeing this hive
quote after dinner to mister 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.
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So as being hived in glass, you may see the
bees making their honey and combs mighty pleasantly. I agree
with Samuel Peeps that it is mighty pleasant to watch
the bees through the class. It really is. Anytime I'm
in a science museum, I get super excited when there
is a glass bee enclosure. I think it's oddly soothing.
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There's something about it that just puts the brain at rest.
Transparent hives let people get a much closer and more
accurate look at a lot of day to day life
of bees, including their anatomy and their reproduction. In the
eighteenth century, for example, French inventor Renee and Juan Fechol
del Remuer used transparent hives to do some really groundbreaking
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work about bee reproduction and the way that bees used
their bodies to regulate the hive's temperature. In the late
eighteenth century, Swiss entomologist and naturalist Francois huber took this
bee observation one step forward with what he called a
leaf hive. This was a beehive shaped almost like a book,
with each comb in its own wooden frame and the
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frames on hinges so that you could move from one
page to the next. Hubert used this hive in his
extensive study of bees, which he undertook with the help
of his wife, his son, and his assistant Francois Bernan,
who helped record visual observations since Hubert was blind. This
leaf hive was enormously beneficial to scientific study, but it
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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
honeybees that would allow easy removal and extraction of the
honeycombs with as little disruption to the lives of the
bees as possible. And there were a lot of different
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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 with this introduction of bees through colonialism,
but American bee keepers weren't really involved in this until
the eighteen hundreds because before that point there was just
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so much forage available for bees. It was very easy
to keep bees. 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 developing the modern beehive is the Reverend Lorenzo
Lorraine Langstross, who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied
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and built on those earlier centuries of improvements. Langstross based
a lot of his work on a high developed by
August Munn in eighteen thirty four, which used hanging frames
with space between each frame and around each edge. Langstroth
was also inspired by Huber's leaf hive, since it showed
that the frames could be moved without angering the bees
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too badly, and Langstrot'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 remove combs from the hive without angering
the bees or damaging the combs. The hive had to
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protect the bees from the elements with adequate ventilation and
a removable bottom to allow for the removal of dead
bees or other debris. 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 different sizes. And all of the parts
of this hive that he had in mind needed to
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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 in eighteen fifty one. It used hanging
frames with a one centimeter gap between each frame and
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between the edge of the frame and the interior of
the hive itself. This amount of space is also described
as somewhere between a quarter and three eighths of an inch.
Langstroth called this small gap the bee space. Bees needed
to move around the hive, but they won't build their
combes in the space. The hives frames hung in a
durable box of the lid made by cabinet maker Henry Burkham.
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The whole thing made it much easier and more efficient
for beekeepers to check on their beeves and to harvest
their hives. Langstroth patented his hive in eighteen fifty two,
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
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getting started with one did require some initial investment. It
also became a lot easier for people to use Western
honeybees 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
(31:31):
in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands, people
wondered about whether the proliferation of farmed Western honeybees was
part of the problem. The spread of European honeybees also
led to more competition with native bees for forage. There
is some conflicting data about this today. Whether domesticated European
(31:51):
honeybees 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. Another result of the
introduction of the Langstroth hive and the surge of beekeeping
that followed was an expansion of beekeeping as a field.
(32:12):
People started forming beekeeping associations, they established beekeeping journals and
other periodicals, and they started beekeeping guilds. This was a
lot different from previous eras when most people who wrote
about bees were naturalists or philosophers or entomologists, rather than
people who were specializing just in bees and beekeeping. Although
(32:33):
the Langstroth hive has become standard beekeeping equipment in many
parts of the world, beekeeping continues to develop. This episode
has been about social bees that store honey, but starting
in the nineteen fifties, people in the United States and
Japan figured out how to domesticate solitary leaf cutting bees
to pollinate alfalfa plants. Not all of the developments have
(32:54):
been positive, though. In nineteen fifty six, Brazilian agricultural worker
Warwick Estevam Kerr and others were looking for a breed
of bee that might be better suited to the American
tropics than European honeybees were. They imported almost fifty bee
queens from Africa, which he helped to breed with European
(33:15):
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 excluders were removed
from the hives that Kerr was using, something that may
(33:37):
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 honeybees, which
tend to be more aggressive and territorial than their Western counterpart.
They have since spread northward and southward through most of
(33:59):
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 b mythology
and religious symbolism, and how the scientific understanding of bee
society evolved, and how mail order package bees came to
(34:19):
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. Really,
somebody could have a whole entire podcast that was only
about beekeeping history. It is a lot and if you
(34:40):
want a lot more detail about exactly which cultures were
doing what a 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. Your most likely
source to find it is in a university library. It
is a textbook. It is more than seven hundred pages long,
(35:02):
and because it's a textbook, the writing is very spare
in its style. Those are seven hundred plus pages of
detail about bees without a lot of extraneous side. So
that's our brief history of beekeeping. Thanks so much for
(35:25):
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of
the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email
address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
find us all over social media at missed in History,
(35:45):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcas casts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Since we got a little bit about beekeeping
in this week's installment of Unearthed, we're revisiting our episode
on the history of beekeeping today. This episode traces the
history of beekeeping up through the development of the Langstroth
hive in the nineteenth century. But to be clear, the
beekeeping and bee hunting methods that we talk about in
(00:23):
the earlier parts of the episode are still practiced today
all around the world. This episode originally came out on
May eleventh, twenty twenty. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome
(00:47):
to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
I'm fond of bees, me too. Yeah, I don't know
if I've mentioned that on the show before. I don't know.
I spent way too much time, Yes, Dad ushering a
bee out of my garage so I could close the door.
So this is especially timely. Yeah, you know, continuing the
(01:08):
theme of wanting to do some episodes that feel like
they are not catastrophically upsetting because of the state of
the world. I really like bees and beekeeping 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 beekeeping has
(01:32):
a practice has existed for thousands of years. Basically all
over the world. Every continent except Antarctica has native bee
species 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
(01:52):
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 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
(02:14):
by that point. We will get to that part two. Also,
we're using the past tense for a lot of this
episode because we're talking about techniques and practices that started
way 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 practice today.
They did not go away. So most of humanity's beekeeping
(02:34):
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 melifera, but there
are lots of other bees that also store honey, and
they are part of beekeeping history too. The giant honeybee
or APIs dorsata, is native to southern and Southeast Asia.
(02:56):
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
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
(03:19):
insects besides bees, including some species of wasps and ants.
People have harvested and used the honey and other resources
that all of these insects produce 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 honeybees, giant honey bees, and stingless bees,
(03:40):
which have historically made up just the vast majority of
bee keeping efforts around the world. I'm thinking of the
eddyizard line. If bees make honey, do earwigs make chutney?
Bees have been on earth for longer than humans have.
Fossil evidence shows that flowering plants existed at least least
one hundred million years ago during their Cretaceous period, so
(04:04):
did insects that fed from the pollen and nectar found
in those flowers. 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
raided these nests as soon as they realized that they
(04:26):
were there. So yeah, it's it's not a far logical
leap that basically as soon as hominids were like 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 honeycomb, like they're a source of protein. There's
a lot of stuff you can get out of nests
(04:48):
that people were clearly getting way back before recorded history.
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
(05:09):
people in a variety of situations. The exact details vary
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
(05:30):
like buckets or what may be smokers to pacify or
drive away those insects. In places where giant honey bees
nest out in the open, people are climbing ladders or
scaling cliffs to get to the exposed combs. There's also
a painting at the Chatakuk Archaeological site in what is
now Turkey that dates back to about sixty six hundred
(05:51):
BCE which appears to show honeycombs with immature bees inside
the cells that suggests that the people who made the
art have a lot of first hand familiarity with bees
and their nests. There's also some Mesolithic cave art showing
bee's importance to other animals. One rock painting in eastern
Spain shows what appears to be an animal's paw reaching
(06:14):
toward a hole that has flying insects around it, so
that's most likely a bear trying to get it 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 BCE.
(06:34):
These artifacts, which were made in the region around the
Dead Sea, were made by creating a model out of
beeswax and then 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
(06:56):
hunts were probably pretty opportunistic. People would happen upon a
nest of bees somewhere and rate it, probably without a
lot of 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
(07:17):
that was being rated. People would carry away everything that
they could from the nest, and when the human population
was pretty small and bee colonies were really abundant, there
still would have been lots of unaffected colonies so that
the bees themselves survived as a species. As soon as
societies developed the concept of personal property and laws related
(07:38):
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, 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.
(08:01):
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 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
(08:23):
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 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
(08:45):
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 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
(09:07):
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 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
(09:28):
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 experienced bee hunter.
So people also figured out ways to make it easier
to follow a bee back to the nest. In some cultures,
people have physically attached something to the bees to make
them more visible, like a very fine thread, or a
(09:51):
piece of grass or a little bit of paper. This
idea is so charming to me, but also I'm like, man,
how challenging it must be to just attack something to
a bee while it's drinking some water. 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
(10:13):
it flew back to the nest. People also figured out
ways to take advantage of the fact that 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. Kalumela
has more detail about how this was done in the
(10:33):
Roman Empire writing quote, the joint of a reed with
the knots at either end, is cut, and a hole
bored 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
(10:54):
away and the thumb placed on the whole, and one
bee only released at a time, 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
(11:15):
his former tracks. Otherwise, he opens the hole and allows
them to emerge one after another, and marks the direction
in which most of them fly home, and pursues them
until he is led to the lurking place of the swarm.
Kalamela describes using a piece of reed for making this
bee tracking trap, but other cultures have used this same
(11:36):
basic process, making their traps out of other materials, including antlers, horns,
and 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
(11:58):
parts of tropical Appa and Asia, there is also the
honeyguide bird. These are birds that are fond of eating beeswax,
and bee larvae, but can't easily get into the nest
without help, so after finding a nest, the honeyguide 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
(12:22):
Mozambique have developed calls to basically let the honey guides
know that they are ready to go on a hunt.
And exactly what that call sounds like varies from place
to place. That's a relationship between honeyguide birds and people.
Delights me. Oh same, It's so cool just in general.
The fact that the bird was like, I want to
get in this nest. I can't by myself. I'm gonna
(12:44):
flap my wings around and make noise attention of something bigger.
So as people moved from harvesting nests that they happen
to find to intentionally searching for them, they also move
from just harvesting the nests when they found them to
ten those nests in the wild. People have done things
like wrapping bee trees to insulate them in the winter,
(13:06):
keeping the nests entrances clear, enlarging a cavity where the
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
(13:28):
close the door behind them, or building steps and ladders
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
(13:51):
the walls. That gets a little closer to the way
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
(14:14):
very general sense, a beehive is any man made enclosure
for housing bees, and people have been keeping bees in
hives for a really long time, overlapping all that bee
hunting that we just talked about earlier. This possibly goes
back all the way to the very beginnings of agriculture.
A paper published in the journal Nature in twenty sixteen
(14:35):
describes bees wax lipid residues that were found in Neolithic
pottery samples from Europe, 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
(14:56):
in hives in the Nile Delta by about five thousand
bees An ancient Egyptian art is full of depictions of
bees and hives and beekeeping. One relief dating back to
the Fifth Dynasty, which started around twenty four to sixty
five BCE, shows beekeepers at work in an apiary, suggesting
that beekeeping was well established in ancient Egypt at that point.
(15:19):
Honey bees also have a place in Egyptian mythology as
being transformed from the tears of the god Raw after
they fell to earth. The first written depiction of a
beehive in China dates back to about three hundred BCE,
although the first Chinese references to honey as medicine are
ten times older than that. In Mesoamerica, people started keeping
(15:40):
stingless bees in hives made out of calabash gourds somewhere
between three hundred BCE and three hundred cees, so in
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
(16:03):
not always. The other end had some kind of removable
covering to allow people to harvest 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 a removable covering at one end that had a
hole in the middle for the bees to pass through.
(16:24):
Around the world, these horizontal hives were made using a
variety of materials. Hollow logs, including logs 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 or clay pottery. Sometimes
people scored the interior of pottery cylinders with shallow lines
(16:47):
that were cut into the surface, both to give the
bees a roughened anchor point when they started to 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
(17:08):
vertically oriented rather than horizontal. The giant honey bees 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
(17:28):
just a matter of sticking them to a tree. Beekeepers
have to account for wind, sunlight, surrounding foliage, and more
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,
(17:50):
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
was cool and damp, like for example, in England, steps
were usually kept in little shelves or shelters that offered
some kind of protection from the elements. Most of the
time a skeep is harvest by lifting it up off
(18:11):
of that flat surface that it rests on and then
removing the contents from underneath, but some steps also have
sort of a hinged lid up at the top. In
many cases, 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
(18:32):
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 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,
(18:53):
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 colmbs to try to
preserve more of the bee colonies. If you could easily
remove just some sections of honeycomb without damaging the others
(19:13):
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 removable combs were vertically oriented and opened at the top,
with a series of slats or bars placed over the
(19:35):
opening instead of 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 rest of the combs untouched. One of the first
written records of a hive like this came from French
(19:57):
doctor Jacob Spon and English botan George Wheeler. They were
traveling together and saw them in use in Attica, Greece
in sixteen seventy five, so hundreds of years ago. Similar
systems also developed, apparently separately, in Vietnam. By the time
people started developing hives with removable combs, they had also
started developing beekeeping garments that were meant to minimize stings.
(20:21):
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 they removed
what they did wear to keep bees from being trapped
in that fabric. In other places, people may have done
(20:42):
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 minimize the likelihood of getting stung. The details
depended somewhat on what was already fashionable in a particular place.
(21:04):
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 least some visibility. Was because hoods were a
little more common in terms of fashion in England, where
(21:25):
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
seventeen ninety six, bee master John Keyes published a book
called The Antient Bee Master's Farewell or Full and Plane
(21:46):
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 on Shirach and
other distinguished apiators on the continent. Deduced from a series
(22:06):
of experiments during thirty years. Oh how I love a
long title. HU. It has a chapter on bee dress
in which Keys advises making a hood by attaching bolting
cloth to the brim of an old hat, with the
brim cut down to two inches all the way around
and the cloth hanging a foot in the areas around
(22:27):
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 allow
for things like sifting with it. Keys also concludes this
(22:47):
chapter by saying, quote, women should not meddle with bees
without this bee dress, nor than without the addition of
a man's coat. And I almost said breeches. Also, I
don't want it tell you to dress like a man,
but it might be in your best interest, but I'm
not saying it. I love that quote a lot, like
(23:08):
I almost said breaching, almost, but maybe not. Keith's book
was just on the cusp of beekeeping as most people
might recognize it today, and we're going to get into
that after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
(23:30):
Starting in about the seventeenth century, a couple of things
happened in tandem that radically changed beekeeping pretty much around
the world. One was that colonists started introducing European or
Western honeybees into other parts of the world to which
they were not native. This started with the first successful
(23:50):
introduction of European honeybees into Bermuda in sixteen seventeen, with
those bees kept cool during the voyage across the Atlantic
to try to keep them in a way intertime 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
(24:11):
European honeybees spread really quickly, with swarms of bees pretty
much moving ahead of the colonists. The other was a
shift in beekeeping as it was practiced with European honeybees.
Starting in the sixteen hundreds, there was a huge focus
on the idea of scientific beekeeping, especially in Europe. Beekeepers, naturalists, entomologists,
(24:34):
and others all wanted to improve the 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
(24:54):
thanks to beekeeping. One development that was part of this
was the observation high, 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 Damiri described an observation hive that had belonged to Aristotle.
(25:15):
Wrote that the bees were so annoyed by Aristotle's nosing
into their business that they covered over the glass with clay.
Aristotle lived in the fourth century BCE, 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
(25:36):
that by the time al Damiri was writing, at least
the idea of an observation hive existed. I love the
idea of bees building a privacy wall, though, yea. 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, doctor John Wilkins gave an observation
(25:59):
high to English gardener and diarist John Evelyn, who documented
it with a diagram. A year later. On May fifth,
sixteen sixty five, Samuel Peeps wrote about seeing this hive
quote after dinner to mister 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.
(26:22):
So as being hived in glass, you may see the
bees making their honey and combs mighty pleasantly. I agree
with Samuel Peeps that it is mighty pleasant to watch
the bees through the class. It really is. Anytime I'm
in a science museum, I get super excited when there
is a glass bee enclosure. I think it's oddly soothing.
(26:43):
There's something about it that just puts the brain at rest.
Transparent hives let people get a much closer and more
accurate look at a lot of day to day life
of bees, including their anatomy and their reproduction. In the
eighteenth century, for example, French inventor Renee and Juan Fechol
del Remuer used transparent hives to do some really groundbreaking
(27:05):
work about bee reproduction and the way that bees used
their bodies to regulate the hive's temperature. In the late
eighteenth century, Swiss entomologist and naturalist Francois huber took this
bee observation one step forward with what he called a
leaf hive. This was a beehive shaped almost like a book,
with each comb in its own wooden frame and the
(27:26):
frames on hinges so that you could move from one
page to the next. Hubert used this hive in his
extensive study of bees, which he undertook with the help
of his wife, his son, and his assistant Francois Bernan,
who helped record visual observations since Hubert was blind. This
leaf hive was enormously beneficial to scientific study, but it
(27:49):
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
honeybees that would allow easy removal and extraction of the
honeycombs with as little disruption to the lives of the
bees as possible. And there were a lot of different
(28:10):
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 with this introduction of bees through colonialism,
but American bee keepers weren't really involved in this until
the eighteen hundreds because before that point there was just
(28:33):
so much forage available for bees. It was very easy
to keep bees. 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 developing the modern beehive is the Reverend Lorenzo
Lorraine Langstross, who was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied
(28:53):
and built on those earlier centuries of improvements. Langstross based
a lot of his work on a high developed by
August Munn in eighteen thirty four, which used hanging frames
with space between each frame and around each edge. Langstroth
was also inspired by Huber's leaf hive, since it showed
that the frames could be moved without angering the bees
(29:14):
too badly, and Langstrot'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 remove combs from the hive without angering
the bees or damaging the combs. The hive had to
(29:37):
protect the bees from the elements with adequate ventilation and
a removable bottom to allow for the removal of dead
bees or other debris. 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 different sizes. And all of the parts
of this hive that he had in mind needed to
(29:59):
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 in eighteen fifty one. It used hanging
frames with a one centimeter gap between each frame and
(30:21):
between the edge of the frame and the interior of
the hive itself. This amount of space is also described
as somewhere between a quarter and three eighths of an inch.
Langstroth called this small gap the bee space. Bees needed
to move around the hive, but they won't build their
combes in the space. The hives frames hung in a
durable box of the lid made by cabinet maker Henry Burkham.
(30:46):
The whole thing made it much easier and more efficient
for beekeepers to check on their beeves and to harvest
their hives. Langstroth patented his hive in eighteen fifty two,
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
(31:10):
getting started with one did require some initial investment. It
also became a lot easier for people to use Western
honeybees 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
(31:31):
in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands, people
wondered about whether the proliferation of farmed Western honeybees was
part of the problem. The spread of European honeybees also
led to more competition with native bees for forage. There
is some conflicting data about this today. Whether domesticated European
(31:51):
honeybees 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. Another result of the
introduction of the Langstroth hive and the surge of beekeeping
that followed was an expansion of beekeeping as a field.
(32:12):
People started forming beekeeping associations, they established beekeeping journals and
other periodicals, and they started beekeeping guilds. This was a
lot different from previous eras when most people who wrote
about bees were naturalists or philosophers or entomologists, rather than
people who were specializing just in bees and beekeeping. Although
(32:33):
the Langstroth hive has become standard beekeeping equipment in many
parts of the world, beekeeping continues to develop. This episode
has been about social bees that store honey, but starting
in the nineteen fifties, people in the United States and
Japan figured out how to domesticate solitary leaf cutting bees
to pollinate alfalfa plants. Not all of the developments have
(32:54):
been positive, though. In nineteen fifty six, Brazilian agricultural worker
Warwick Estevam Kerr and others were looking for a breed
of bee that might be better suited to the American
tropics than European honeybees were. They imported almost fifty bee
queens from Africa, which he helped to breed with European
(33:15):
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 excluders were removed
from the hives that Kerr was using, something that may
(33:37):
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 honeybees, which
tend to be more aggressive and territorial than their Western counterpart.
They have since spread northward and southward through most of
(33:59):
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 b mythology
and religious symbolism, and how the scientific understanding of bee
society evolved, and how mail order package bees came to
(34:19):
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. Really,
somebody could have a whole entire podcast that was only
about beekeeping history. It is a lot and if you
(34:40):
want a lot more detail about exactly which cultures were
doing what a 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. Your most likely
source to find it is in a university library. It
is a textbook. It is more than seven hundred pages long,
(35:02):
and because it's a textbook, the writing is very spare
in its style. Those are seven hundred plus pages of
detail about bees without a lot of extraneous side. So
that's our brief history of beekeeping. Thanks so much for
(35:25):
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of
the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email
address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
find us all over social media at missed in History,
(35:45):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcas casts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
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