Lesson 5: A Short History of Beekeeping
From bee trees to the modern hive
People and honey bees go back a very long way. Knowing a little of that history explains why the hive you'll use looks the way it does, and why one idea from 1851 still shapes every hive box sold today.
Honey hunting
Long before anyone kept bees, people hunted for them. Archaeological evidence shows the relationship between people and bees goes back at least 17,000 years. Old rock paintings in Spain show people taking honey from wild colonies.
Early honey hunters found colonies living in hollow trees. In the autumn they would kill the bees or drive them away to take all the honey. For most of history honey mattered a great deal, because people had no other source of concentrated sugar.
The first hives
As people learned more about bees, they started giving them homes: clay pots, straw baskets and wooden boxes. People have kept bees in man-made hives for at least 4,000 years. The goal was to control the bees so the colony could survive from year to year and still produce honey.
But these early hives had a big problem. The bees attached their combs to the walls, so the only way to get at the honey was to cut the combs out, which damaged or destroyed the nest. Nobody could look inside to see whether the colony was healthy.
Honey bees come to America
Honey bees are not native to North America. The native peoples of the Americas had many kinds of native bees, but not honey bees. Honey bees were brought over from Europe by European settlers in the 1600s and have been kept here ever since. (North America still has more than 4,000 kinds of native bees, and lesson 82 covers them.)
1851: bee space and the movable frame
Scientists had been studying honey bees since the 1500s, but modern beekeeping really began in 1851. That year an American minister, Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, worked out the importance of what we now call bee space.
Bee space is a gap of about 3/8 inch that bees leave open between their combs, so they have room to move and work. If a gap inside the hive is about that size, bees leave it open. If it's much wider or narrower, they close it up with wax and bee glue (propolis).
Langstroth built a wooden box with frames of comb that hang with bee space on every side. Because the bees don't glue or build comb into those gaps, each frame can be lifted out, looked at and put back. This was the first modern movable-frame hive.
That changed everything. For the first time a beekeeper could inspect the whole hive: check the queen, look for disease, see how much food the colony had, and take honey without destroying the nest. Almost everything in this course, from reading a frame (lesson 34) to controlling mites (Chapter 8), depends on it. The standard hive you'll learn about in lesson 17 is still called the Langstroth hive, and lesson 18 covers bee space in detail.
From hobby to industry
Since then, beekeeping has become a large and skilled industry that provides honey, beeswax and pollination of many crops. The U.S. Department of Agriculture began research on bees in 1891, at a bee research laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, and bee research continues at labs across the country. Yet most beekeepers today are still what they have been for centuries: people with a few hives who enjoy their bees.
What to remember
- People hunted wild honey long before they kept bees; honey was once their only concentrated sweet.
- Early hives (pots, baskets, boxes) couldn't be opened without cutting out the comb.
- Honey bees aren't native to North America; settlers brought them from Europe in the 1600s.
- In 1851 Langstroth built the movable-frame hive around bee space (about 3/8 inch), which lets beekeepers inspect every frame. It's still the basis of the standard hive.
Quick check
- What problem did early hives have that the movable-frame hive solved?
- What is bee space, and roughly how wide is it?
- Are honey bees native to North America?
Show answers
1. Bees attached their combs to the hive walls, so the comb had to be cut out to get honey, and the colony couldn't be inspected. 2. The open gap of about 3/8 inch that bees leave between combs so they can move and work. 3. No; European settlers brought them in the 1600s.
Adapted from: Purdue Extension, 4-H Beekeeping Division I: Understanding the Honey Bee (4-H-571-W), "History of Beekeeping" and "Beeswax and Honeycomb"; USDA National Agricultural Library, Apiculture and Beekeeping; Delaplane, K. S., Honey Bees and Beekeeping (UGA Extension Bulletin 1045, rev. 2017); Georgia Department of Agriculture, Apiary Program: Honeybees.
Adapted from university Extension sources. Experienced Georgia beekeepers are reviewing these lessons. See something that doesn't match your experience? Tell us.