Beehive

A beehive is a structure in which a large group of honeybees live, breed, and produce honey. Although beehives have existed in the wild for centuries, modern usage of the term usually refers to manmade structures meant to house a colony of bees for the extraction of honey and beeswax. Beehives are often built for agricultural purposes; honeybees are kept to pollinate plant seeds. Those who build and tend to beehives are known as beekeepers. The practice of beekeeping dates back thousands of years to ancient Egypt. Since then, a number of beehive designs have emerged for use in beekeeping.

Background

Beehives have existed in their natural form since the honeybee came into existence millions of years ago. Inside a beehive is a nest that is constructed of beeswax used to form a honeycomb, which consists of rows of hexagonal (six-sided) wax cells clustered together and used to store pollen and bee eggs. Ancient people took the honeycomb from wild bee nests and ate it. Eventually, people began bringing bee nests closer to their settlements, housing them in their own handmade structures.

The earliest documented use of beehives dates back to ancient Egypt. Honeybees were an important resource to the ancient Egyptians, who used beeswax to make cosmetics and other items such as funerary masks. Ancient Egyptian illustrations depicting beekeeping date back to 2400 BCE; most scholars believe these illustrations are the earliest known documentation of beekeeping. According to their drawings, ancient Egyptian beehives were long clay cylinders and skeps, upturned baskets under which bees built their nest.

Archaeologists also discovered dozens of clay cylinders containing the remains of honeybees at an excavation site in Tel Rehov in the Jordan River Valley of modern-day Israel. Dating back to the tenth century BCE, these cylinders are the first tangible evidence of beekeeping in the ancient world.

Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Israel all had organized beekeeping centers until the fall of the Roman Empire about 400 CE. Beekeeping later became popular within Christian monasteries and convents in England, which often housed multiple beehives in spaces that became known as apiaries. These beekeeping centers were closed in the 1500s by King Henry VIII when he broke ties with the Roman Catholic Church.

Over the next few centuries, people transported honeybees to the New World and other places. Innovations in beehive technology made beekeeping a profitable endeavor by the nineteenth century, especially as demand for honey, beeswax, and efficient crop pollination grew. This period also saw the introduction of the Langstroth hive, a beehive created by beekeeper Loranzo Langstroth. It was a moveable-frame hive that used the concept of "bee space," a space measurement system that greatly improved the efficiency of honeycomb creation. The Langstroth hive became the preferred beehive of many beekeepers all over the world.

Overview

Honeybee colonies consist of three types of bees: the queen bee, the worker bee, and the drone bee. The queen's job is to lay eggs to increase the number of bees in a beehive. The drone bees are males with one job, to impregnate the queen. Workers bees are female and tasked with sustaining the hive. Worker bees have a number of jobs, which include building and tending to the honeycomb, nursing the bee larvae, attending to the queen, and foraging for pollen and nectar to feed the drones and larvae. The success of the beehive is reliant on the performance of all three types of bees.

Interest in local and sustainable beehive management has grown over the years with the rise in honeybee disease and dwindling populations. Human-built beehives come in a variety of models, but the three main types are the Langstroth, the top-bar, and the Warré.

The most popular beehive is the Langstroth hive, which consists of stacked wooden boxes that contain wooden frames. Inside the frames is a layer of hexagonal wax, which the bees use for guidance when constructing their honeycomb. Langstroth hives have top and bottom boxes that contain from eight to ten frames. The bees make honey in the top box and build their nest in the bottom box. A smaller box called a honey super can be situated on top of these larger boxes to expand the hive and allow for more honey storage. The hive boxes can get very heavy depending on the size of the colony and the amount of honey it produces. Langstroth hives are easily moved and manipulated, which makes them the first choice of modern beekeepers.

Another type of hive is the top-bar hive, which is a frameless, long wooden box set up horizontally on a raised platform. The top of the hive has a pitched cover to keep rain and debris out, and the bottom is v-shaped. The hive contains removable bars on which the bees build their honeycombs. This type of beehive does not provide any hexagonal wax framework for the bees to build on. Instead, bees suspend their honeycomb from the top bars, which are lined up parallel next to each other across the box. This type of hive is much lighter than the Langstroth hive and its methods are less disruptive to the bees.

The third most common type of beehive is the Warré hive. Developed by Abbot Émile Warré, this hive is a kind of hybrid of the Langstroth and top-bar hive. The Warré hive requires little oversight and is primarily used by beekeepers looking to pollinate their gardens. Like the Langstroth, the Warré hive stacks wooden boxes on top of each other. Rather than using frames, the Warré hive uses bars from which the honeycomb may hang like the top-bar hive. The Warré hive utilizes a small box at the top of the hive that is filled with wood shavings sandwiched between two pieces of cotton. This feature is meant to regulate the temperature and moisture within the hive. Honey supers are added to the bottom rather than the top, allowing the bees to build the honeycomb upwards.

Several more complex models of beehives have been developed over the years, including the WBC (named for its inventor William Broughton Carr), the Cheshire, the Cowan Hines, the Perone, and the Congested Districts Board (CDB). Beekeepers continue to come up with new designs for beehives.

Bibliography

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