The Lives of Bees
Page 9
to calm them and to drive the queen toward the front of the hive.
He then removed combs containing honey that he had sliced free
with a sharp, flat- bladed tool shaped like a large spatula fixed to a
long, wooden handle.
3. He left behind in the hive any combs that he had cut and that
contained brood, propping them in position on the hive floor with
sticks slightly longer than the tube’s diameter so the combs ran
perpendicular to the long axis of the hive.
4. In the swarming season, he opened the hives from the front to in-
spect the colonies’ brood combs, and he either cut out unwanted
queen cells to inhibit swarming or he removed combs with queen
cells and worker bees and installed them in an empty hive to make
a split (a new colony with a queen).
We can see, therefore, that already several thousand years ago, beekeepers
in Egypt and the lands east of the Mediterranean Sea were managing colo-
nies in ways that were beneficial for people but were not altogether be-
nevolent for the bees: packing colonies in crowded apiaries, stealing their
honey, and manipulating their reproduction. When hive beekeeping spread
west and north from the Middle East to regions around the Mediterranean
Sea, the relationship between beekeepers and their bees evidently re-
mained much like what existed in biblical times. The most detailed writer
on beekeeping in the Roman world was Lucius Junius Moderatus Colu-
mella, a farm owner who lived in Rome in the first century ce. Most of
book 9 in his 12- volume work De re rustica (On agriculture) is devoted to
beekeeping. He provides sound advice for getting started as a beekeeper:
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Fig. 3.4. An apiary of stacked, cylindrical hives made of mud in central Egypt.
The spaces between the hives have been filled with mud to prevent swarms from
moving into them. Each hive has a small, circular opening on the front end, to-
gether with one to four white markings that tell the beekeeper when the colony
was established.
cluster hives in a walled apiary beside the beekeeper’s dwelling so they will
“be under the master’s eye,” and arrange them in at most “three rows of
hives one above another.” This arrangement suggests that the Roman bee-
keeper typically had horizontal hives (like those found at Tel Rehov), from
which honeycombs were harvested from one end. Although Columella
does not specify a certain shape or size of hive, he does advise to use well-
insulated hives made of the thick bark of cork trees—that is, the cork oak
( Quercus suber)—not those made of earthenware, because colonies housed
in ceramic hives “are burnt by the heat of summer and frozen by the cold
of winter.” Also, he provides detailed guidance on colony management,
such as opening hives in the spring to remove all the filth that has collected
over winter, uniting weak colonies, capturing and hiving swarms, cutting
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out queen cells to control swarming, transferring brood combs, killing
drones (“bees born of larger size than the rest”), and moving hives between
spring and summer locations (to “give the bees a more liberal diet from
the late- flowering blossoms of thyme, marjoram, and savory”). He also
advises a late- summer honey harvest by cutting out honeycombs from one
end of each hive, using sharp knives, but leaving at least one- third of the
honey. Then, “when the winter is already causing apprehension,” he recom-
mends chinking holes in the hives with “a mixture of clay and ox- dung”
and, finally, “heaping stalks and leaves on top of them” to fortify them
against cold weather. Clearly, beekeepers in the time of Columella loved
their bees and wanted to care for them, but they also wanted their bees to
produce large quantities of honey and beeswax for harvest.
After the Roman period, traditional beekeeping north of the Mediter-
ranean region developed along two distinct trajectories. One was the prac-
tice of tree beekeeping (in German, Zeidlerei), which consisted of harvest-
ing honey from colonies living in tree cavities (either natural or man- made)
that were accessed by tightly fitting doors. This manner of beekeeping was
conducted throughout the enormous belt of deciduous forest that then
stretched some 3,000 kilometers (ca. 1,800 miles) across northeastern
Europe, from the Baltic coast to the Ural Mountains. Unbroken by moun-
tains or sea, this expanse of sparsely populated forests was highly favorable
to the settlement of wild colonies of honey bees. It contained ancient wil-
low, basswood, hazel, and oak trees, which provided snug nesting sites,
along with herbaceous plants such as raspberries and brambles in the forest
openings, which supplied the bees with nectar and pollen. The work of
tree beekeeping was conducted by small teams of men. Each one covered
a large woodland area—a bee forest—that might contain 100 or more
trees containing an accessible nest cavity, of which perhaps only 10 or so
were occupied by honey bees at any one time. Evidently, the low density
of colonies living in these bee forests was caused by the limited supply of
bee forage, not a lack of availability of suitable nest cavities.
Some of the large trees that these tree beekeepers monitored enclosed
natural cavities that had been fitted with a door, but most contained arti-
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ficial nest cavities that the beekeepers had prepared with care. To make
one, the beekeeper climbed 5–20 meters (15–60 feet) up the side of a
large tree using a leather climbing strap, trimming off limbs as he worked
his way up (Fig. 3.5). Then, perched high in the tree and usually facing its
south side, he chopped a vertical slot about 10 centimeters (4 inches) wide
and about 1 meter (ca. 3 feet) tall in the tree’s trunk. This created the ac-
cess opening for this nest cavity. Next, he used a long- handled chisel to
excavate a 40–60 liter (ca. 10–16 gallon) chamber inside the access open-
ing. He also chiseled out a smaller opening for the nest entrance; usually
it faced south and was positioned about halfway up the cavity. This smaller
opening was roughly 5 centimeters (2 inches) wide and 10 centimeters (4
inches) tall, and into it, to reduce the entranceway, the beekeeper pounded
a carved wooden plug with two vertical slots, one on each side and each
about 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) wide. Finally, he fitted a rabbeted door
tightly into the access opening to secure the nest cavity from bears, hor-
nets, woodpeckers, and other enemies of the bees. While all this work
was being done high in the tree, another beekeeper was carving the land-
owner’s mark—a goat’s horn, a bow, or just grooves in various arrange-
ments—into the bark at the base of the tree.
In early summer, the tree beekeepers inspected the nesting sites they
had prepared to see which ones were occupied. Then, in late summer or
autumn
, they revisited the occupied ones and harvested a portion of the
honeycombs they contained. There are no records of tree beekeepers in-
stalling swarms in empty tree cavities, and it seems unlikely that they
could do this, so they must have relied almost exclusively on attracting
wild swarms to their artificial nest cavities.
Tree beekeeping was an important activity in medieval times within
eastern Germany, Poland, the Baltic region, and Russia. Indeed, it played
a major role in the economies of these heavily forested lands, because
honey and beeswax, and in some places furs, were the only natural sources
of wealth. Honey was always important for making mead, and by 700 ce,
beeswax was much needed by Christian churches, abbeys, and convents
for making candles. A few centuries later, by around 1000 ce, the Russian
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Fig. 3.5. Bashkir tree beekeeper who has climbed high up in a tree in which a
hollow was prepared to house a wild colony of honey bees. His tools include
climbing ropes, ax for prying out the rabbeted doors (stacked above him), bee
veil, smoker, and wooden pail with lid. Having opened the tree cavity, he is ex-
tracting honey combs and placing them in the pail. The nest entrance is just to
the right of his hands. Photo taken in the South Ural region in the republic of
Bashkortostan, Russian Federation.
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princes, boyars, and monasteries owned many bee forests, and a special
class of peasant, the bortnik, served as the tree beekeepers. (In Russian, the
earliest word for “hive” was bort, a hollow tree trunk; hence bortnik was the
tree beekeeper.) Bortniki usually worked in pairs or larger groups to look
after the wild colonies and harvest their honey and wax. The closeness of
the Russian peasants to honey bees is shown by their term of affection for
a worker bee— Bozhiya ptashka, God’s little bird—and by their view that
killing a bee was a sin. It is not surprising, therefore, that in 1854, Peter
Prokopovich, the father of modern beekeeping in Russia, reported that a
bortnik would collect from each bee tree no more than one wooden pail of
honeycomb (about 6 kilograms/13 pounds). Evidently, the tree beekeep-
ers in Russia tried to conduct sustainable harvests of the honey from the
colonies living in their bee trees.
Honey bee colonies were disturbed only lightly by the practices of tree
beekeeping. Tree beekeepers merely provided wild colonies with suitable
nest sites and collected a modest fraction of each colony’s honey stores
toward the end of summer. Eventually, however, tree beekeeping gave way
to hive beekeeping—at first, using upright log hives made of tree trunks—
as the vast forests of northeastern Europe were cleared for agriculture,
large trees became valued as sources of timbers and boards, and prohibi-
tions arose against gouging out hollows in valuable trees. Tree beekeeping
is, however, still practiced by Bashkir beekeepers in the South Ural region
of Russia, specifically within the Bashkir Ural, a 450- square- kilometer
(175- square- mile) region of forested mountains that includes the Bashkiria
National Park in Bashkortostan. Within this protected wilderness area are
some 1,200 trees with man- made nesting cavities for the bees, of which
approximately 300 are occupied each summer.
The second trajectory along which traditional beekeeping developed
north of the Mediterranean region emerged in northwestern Europe, in
the lands that now include western Germany, the Netherlands, Britain,
Ireland, and France. Large trees were not always plentiful in these places,
and the most widely used traditional hive was a large, inverted basket
called a skep. (The word skep comes from skeppa, an Old Norse word for
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a big basket, so evidently it entered the English language after Vikings
began raiding and settling in England, starting around 800 ce). Skeps were
built at first of woven plant stems (wicker) coated with clay and cow dung
for insulation and waterproofing, but later they were made also of coiled
straw. Both wicker and coiled- straw skeps were inverted, and the open
mouth was set on a flat stone or wooden stand (Fig. 3.6). Most skeps were
kept under cover, often on a shelf built against a house wall with some
form of protection overhead but sometimes in a freestanding lean- to shel-
ter with roof, back, and sides. Sometimes skeps were housed in recesses
built in stone walls (bee boles), especially those associated with monaster-
ies or other church property.
Beekeeping with skeps was often called swarm beekeeping because it
depended on the production and hiving of swarms in early summer; the
beekeepers then left the colonies alone to store honey from flows later in
the summer and finally killed a certain portion of all the colonies to har-
vest their honey while leaving the rest alone to overwinter. Constant watch
was required during the swarming season to capture the swarms, for the
beekeeper needed to have several times as many colonies at the end of
summer as he had had at its start. Often a swarm was caught by holding
an inverted skep beneath a branch where bees had settled and then shaking
the branch so the bees dropped into their new home. Sometimes a swarm
was caught by placing a swarm catcher—a tube of netting held in shape
with several hoops—over the skep’s entrance when a swarm began to
issue. Some beekeepers knew that if they heard a sound like that of a bugle
horn coming from a skep that had cast a prime swarm, then they should
expect an afterswarm to issue soon. Beekeeping with skeps required abun-
dant swarming, and beekeepers encouraged this by making their skeps
small so that their colonies became crowded in late spring and early sum-
mer. The skep sizes recommended in English beekeeping books from the
1500s to 1800s range from 9 to 36 liters (2.4–9.5 gallons), and were typi-
cally about 20 liters (5.3 gallons), so they were much smaller than modern
hives. For comparison, a single 10- frame Langstroth hive body has a vol-
ume of 42 liters (11.1 gallons).
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Fig. 3.6. Woodcut showing two wicker skeps on a wooden stand and a beekeeper
wearing a hood with a woven screen insert.
Various methods were used for killing colonies living in skeps so their
honey and wax could be harvested. These include standing the skep over
a pit containing burning sulfur, or placing the skep in a closed sack that
was immersed in water. Sometimes, however, skep beekeepers did not
kill their colonies to harvest their honey but instead cleared the honey-
combs of bees by driving them from one skep into another. This process
involved smoking the bees to induce them to fill up on honey, then turn-
ing the occupied skep upside down and attaching an empty skep over the
occupied one, and finall
y hitting the sides of the bottom (occupied) skep
for several minutes to stimulate the bees to run upward into the empty
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skep. Unfortunately, a colony driven in late summer into a hive without
combs often did not survive winter unless it was given some honey- filled
combs. A second, nonlethal practice for harvesting honey from colonies
in skeps was to slice the bottoms off some of the honeycombs after clear-
ing them of bees by using smoke. This method matches that used for
harvesting honey in tree beekeeping.
Skep beekeeping had several advantages over the methods of hive bee-
keeping that preceded it, including the Egyptian beekeeping method with
clay pipes and the Roman beekeeping with hollow logs. Beekeeping with
skeps rather than pipes or logs meant that colonies could be moved to
places associated with strong nectar flows (times of intense nectar collec-
tion), such as the Lüneburger Heath south of Hamburg, Germany, where
there is a huge ling heather ( Calluna vulgaris) bloom in August and Septem-
ber. Beekeeping with skeps also made it easy for a beekeeper to inspect
some of the combs in a colony’s nest, so he or she could assess in a general
way the colony’s strength, honey stores, and preparations for swarming
(presence of queen cells). But beekeepers using skeps still could not make
thorough inspections of their colonies’ combs, so they could not always
determine whether a colony was queenright (had a laying queen), had
filled its combs with honey, was preparing to swarm, or was diseased. Also,
because skep beekeepers relied heavily on killing colonies to harvest their
honey, they needed to encourage swarming, which required housing their
colonies in small hives. This kept their colonies small, so their honey pro-
duction per colony was low. Moreover, by the early 1800s, there was
growing opposition to the merciless killing of colonies housed in skeps to
take their honey. Beekeepers needed a better hive.
FROM FIXED- COMB TO MOVABLE- COMB HIVES
In 1848, Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a 38- year- old Congregational pas-
tor, resigned his ministry in Greenfield, Massachusetts, due to ill health