What Beekeeping Is

People have taken honey from bees for thousands of years, and keeping the bees themselves is almost as old. This chapter sets out what beekeeping is, the words beekeepers use, what a hive can produce, how the craft developed, and how a modern hive is laid out. Later chapters build on this: the colony itself, equipment, getting started, the beekeeping year, and the harvest.

What Beekeeping Is

Wikipedia's Beekeeping article says beekeeping (or apiculture) is "the maintenance of bee colonies, commonly in artificial beehives". Honey bees of the genus Apis are the most commonly kept, though other honey-producing bees, such as Melipona stingless bees, are also kept. Hives are kept in an apiary, or "bee yard".

What a Hive Produces

The article says beekeepers keep bees to collect honey and other products of the hive: beeswax, propolis, bee pollen and royal jelly. It lists other sources of income too: crop pollination, raising queens, and producing package bees for sale. Later chapters return to each of these (the harvest in Chapter 8, pollination in Chapter 9).

A Short History

The article says humans began trying to maintain wild bee colonies at least 10,000 years ago, in hollow logs, wooden boxes, pottery vessels and straw skeps. Beekeeping in pottery began about 9,000 years ago in Anatolia, and beeswax traces turn up in Middle Eastern potsherds from about 7,000 BCE. Egyptian art shows domestication around 4,500 years ago, with smoke used on hives.

Why harvesting used to destroy colonies

Before movable comb hives, the article says, harvesting honey frequently destroyed the whole colony: wild hives were broken into using smoke, and in medieval northern Europe the colony in a skep was often killed with burning sulfur so the honey was spared. Old dark brood comb could not be replaced either. The oldest evidence of movable frames (1669) comes from Greece, though the article says their use is probably more than 3,000 years old.

Bee space and Langstroth

In the 19th century Lorenzo Langstroth made practical use of Huber's earlier discovery of a specific distance between the wax combs, later called the bee space. The article gives it as commonly between 6 and 9 mm, though up to 15 mm has been found in populations in Ethiopia. Frames hung at that spacing mean bees leave the gap open as a passage rather than filling it with wax, so any frame can be slid out for inspection. The article says this enabled large-scale commercial honey production in Europe and the US.

How a Modern Hive Is Laid Out

The article says modern movable-comb hives differ in size from country to country (Langstroth and Dadant in the US, the British National in the UK, the Smith hive still popular in Scotland), but share common features: square or rectangular, movable wooden frames, and a floor, brood-box, honey super, crown-board and roof. A queen excluder sits between the brood-box and the honey supers to keep the queen from laying in cells next to honey intended for eating. Because of mite pests, floors are often replaced, temporarily or permanently, by wire mesh with a removable tray. Here is the layout, top to bottom:

Chapter 3 covers each part in turn. The order shown is my reading of the article's list and its excluder sentence; the article does not give a single top-to-bottom diagram (check).

Not Yet Verified, and Sources

• Source. Everything attributed to "the article" comes from the plain-text version of Wikipedia's Beekeeping article (about 42,500 characters). I read only roughly the first third in detail (introduction, history and hive designs); the remaining sections were not read, so nothing from them appears here.
• Not in that part. The idea that a hive's layout is shown top to bottom (check); the advice about siting (check).
• Dates. The article gives both "10,000 years ago" and "6,000 BCE" for early honey collecting in different places, and "4,500 years ago" and "3,100 BCE" for Egypt. I have kept the first set and not tried to reconcile them (check).
• Rehov yield. Calculated from the article's potential figures; not a measured yield.

Exercises