The Lives of Bees

by Thomas D Seeley

  and moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he opened a school for

  young women and started a business as a commercial beekeeper. In the

  latter endeavor, he concentrated on glass- jar beekeeping: producing comb

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  honey inside glass tumblers and small bell jars. The mid- 1800s was a time

  when buyers wanted their honey in the comb, to be sure of its purity, so

  glass jars filled with honeycombs sealed by the bees were a premium prod-

  uct. Langstroth guided his bees to build their honeycombs inside his jars

  by placing empty jars upside down over holes cut in a board (a honey

  board) set atop a hive and then covering the jars with a wooden box (a

  super) to put them in darkness. The bees behaved as they would in nature

  and filled the dark voids above their dark, brood- filled combs with lovely

  white combs stuffed with honey.

  Langstroth’s work as a commercial beekeeper exposed him to the won-

  ders of the behavior and social life of the bees. It also motivated him to

  design better hives than the ones he was using, which were squat wooden

  boxes, 15 centimeters (6 inches) deep and about 45 centimeters (18

  inches) square. Each hive contained 12 wooden bars that were arranged in

  parallel and spaced at intervals of about 3.5 centimeters (1.4 inches) from

  center to center and that were set into rabbets in the front and rear walls

  of the hive. Each bar was the top support for a separate comb. Langstroth

  liked these hives because each one had a large top surface on which he

  could set many jars to be filled with comb honey. But he disliked how the

  bees attached their brood combs to the walls inside his hives, which meant

  that when he needed to remove brood combs to inspect them, he faced

  the bothersome task of slicing the combs free from the hive’s walls.

  Langstroth knew that for beekeeping to be more practical and more

  humane, beekeepers needed a better hive. Ideally, this would be a hive in

  which the bees could live and work naturally and in which the beekeeper

  could access the bees easily. This would enable the beekeeper to make in-

  spections, give assistance, and remove honeycombs, all without undue

  damage to the combs, injury of bees, or waste of honey.

  He began designing a better hive by addressing the difficulty he had of

  simply getting the covers off his hives. Each hive’s cover lay directly on the

  comb bars, so of course Langstroth’s bees glued his hive covers to the

  comb bars using the antimicrobial tree resins (propolis) they had collected

  to coat the inner surfaces of their nests. In 1851, he solved this problem

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  by cutting more deeply—by a scant 9 millimeters (0.35 inch)—the rab-

  bets in the front and rear walls of his hives on which the comb bars rested.

  This lowered the tops of the comb bars so they lay about 9 millimeters

  below the top edge of the hive and thus of the underside of the cover.

  Langstroth was pleased to find that his bees now left open the narrow

  space above the comb bars. Wonderful! This is how he discovered the bee

  space, a structural rule followed by the bees, in which corridors 7–9 mil-

  limeters (0.28–0.35 inch) high are left open for passage. In natural nests,

  corridors of this height are found along the edges of combs, where they

  function as passageways between the two sides of each comb (Fig. 3.7).

  It is curious that initially Langstroth saw his discovery of the bee space

  only as a solution to the problem of the bees attaching his hive covers (or

  the honey boards supporting the jars for comb honey) to the comb bars in

  his hives. Throughout the summer of 1851, he enjoyed the newfound ease

  of opening his hives, but he still struggled with the messy task of slicing

  combs free from his hives’ walls whenever he wanted to pull out combs

  for inspection. It was not until that fall, on October 30, that he realized

  that the bee space would solve this problem too. He described his insight

  as follows:

  Uprights might be fastened to the bars, so as to give the same bee

  space between [them and] the front and rear walls of the hive, and so

  change the slats [or bars] into movable frames. . . . In a moment, the

  suspended movable frames, kept at suitable distances from each other

  and the case containing them, came into being. Seeing by intuition,

  as it were, the end from the beginning, I could scarcely refrain from

  shouting out my “Eureka!” in the open streets.

  Langstroth’s journal entry for 30 October 1851 contains sketches of his

  new plan for movable frames, which includes fastening pieces of “clean

  worker comb” to the bar, or drawing “a thin line of wax across the center

  of the bar” to guide the bees to build their comb in the plane of the frame.

  He also realized the value of adding a bottom piece to his “compound bar”

  so that a bee- space corridor would exist between the frames and the cover,

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  Fig. 3.7. Three passageways on the vertical edge of a comb built inside

  a tree hollow.

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  the frames and the walls, and the frames and the bottom board. This way,

  each movable frame would be surrounded by a bee space except at the two

  points of suspension (Fig. 3.8).

  By the time Langstroth had his insight to build hives with suspended

  movable frames, each separated by a bee space from its neighbors and from

  the ceiling, walls, and floor of the hive, it was too late in the year for him

  to test his ideas in his apiary. Nevertheless, his journal entries for Novem-

  ber 1851 show that he was confident that his concept of combs in movable

  frames would be of the utmost importance for the future of beekeeping,

  because it “will give the apiarian perfect control over his bees.”

  In 1853, Langstroth published his book titled Langstroth on the Hive and

  the Honey- Bee: A Bee Keeper’s Manual. In it, he described his invention of a

  “movable- comb bee- hive” and his use of it in a program of practical and

  profitable beekeeping. By making it easy for beekeepers to open their hives

  and then inspect and manipulate the bees and their combs, Langstroth

  made it possible for beekeepers to perform such operations as dividing

  strong colonies to make artificial swarms, providing weak colonies with

  honey or brood, finding and replacing queens, examining colonies for

  pests and diseases, helping cleanse colonies of pathogens and parasites, and

  removing honey. Moreover, beekeepers could do all these things whenever

  they wanted and with minimal damage to the bees’ home and without any

  injury whatsoever to the bees themselves.

  By giving beekeepers virtual command over the lives of the bees dwell-

  ing in their hives, Langstroth made it possible for beekeepers to produce

  much more surplus honey per colony than before, especially in locations

  with climates and nectar and pollen sources favorable to beekeeping. Bee-

  keepers quickl
y adopted Langstroth’s hive design. The widespread em-

  brace of his movable- frame hive was helped by the fact that the timing of

  his invention coincided with the period in which powered machinery

  made woodworking faster and cheaper. This meant that, despite their pre-

  cise construction, movable- frame hives were affordable in many parts of

  North America and Europe. In the late 1800s, land transport also became

  more mechanized with the development of railroads, which enlarged the

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  Fig. 3.8. Cross section of Lorenzo L. Langstroth’s original movable- frame hive,

  from Cheshire (1888). co = cover; tb = top bar; bs = bee space; s = side of frame; e = entrance; bb = bottom board. This is the first drawing of a Langstroth hive in which the bee space was so labeled.

  markets for honey and made commercial beekeeping more profitable. This

  rise in profitability stimulated further advances in beekeeping technology

  that boosted still further the productivity of the colonies managed by bee-

  keepers. These included wooden section boxes for comb honey produc-

  tion, centrifugal honey extractors for flinging the bees’ honey out of their

  combs, wire- reinforced beeswax comb foundation for strengthening the

  combs built within the new wooden frames, queen excluders for segregat-

  ing the brood chamber and honey combs in a hive, chemical repellents and

  mechanical “bee escapes” for removing bees from honey combs before a

  honey harvest, and still more.

  The proliferation of inventions for boosting a colony’s honey productiv-

  ity was accompanied by fundamental changes in colony management for

  the same purpose. The principal goal of commercial beekeepers living in

  North America and Europe became, and remains to this day, to make their

  colonies grow large in the spring and early summer, but prevent them

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  from swarming, and then harness the energy of each colony’s massive

  workforce to accumulate honey stores far greater than the bees will ever

  need. The beekeeper then harvests and sells the surplus. This manner of

  beekeeping is based on housing colonies in spacious hives comprising five

  or more hive boxes to create a 200- plus liter (ca. 53- plus gallon) nesting

  space with a capacity to hold 100 or more kilograms (220- plus pounds) of

  honey. We shall see that this amount of living space is three to fives times

  greater than the amount colonies seek when they choose their homesites

  by themselves (see chapter 5). Another way to increase a colony’s size, and

  thus boost its capacity for honey production, is to install more than one

  queen in a hive. The queens sharing a hive are prevented from killing each

  other by being separated by queen excluders—metal sheets or wooden

  boards with slots through which workers, but not queens, can squeeze.

  This manipulation creates a colony with a supersize brood nest and an

  enormous population of forager bees. In regions where nectar flows are

  intense, the operation of multi- queen colonies has rewarded beekeepers

  with colossal crops of honey, sometimes more than 500 kilograms (1,100

  pounds) of honey per hive.

  When we look back across the 4,500- year history of beekeeping, in

  which honey bees were first housed in clay pipes and hollow logs, then in

  straw skeps and simple wooden boxes, and most recently in the sophisti-

  cated movable- frame hives of today, we see clearly that Lorenzo L. Lang-

  stroth and the other inventors of modern beekeeping have given bee-

  keepers better hives. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the coming chapters,

  modern beekeeping has not given the bees better lives.

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  4

  ARE HONEY BEES DOMESTICATED?

  The honeybee [is] capable of being tamed or

  domesticated to a most surprising degree.

  — Lorenzo L. Langstroth, Langstroth on the

  Hive and the Honey- Bee, 1853

  Domestication is the process of human selection and breeding of wild spe-

  cies to obtain cultivated variants that thrive in man- made environments

  and that produce things useful to humans, such as food, clothing, assistance

  in hunting, pulling power, and companionship. It is how we have teamed

  up with other species to improve our lives. The practice of human- directed

  selection started at least 15,000 years ago in Eurasia, when dogs were

  domesticated from wolves to serve as hunting partners. About 10,000

  years ago, its scope broadened greatly when our ancestors living in the

  Middle East began to shift their means of subsistence from food collection

  (hunting and gathering) to food production (herding and farming). The

  transition to agriculture involved the intensive domestication of crops,

  livestock, microbes (e.g., brewer’s yeast), and pets. As a rule, the process

  of domestication produces organisms with traits that enable them to thrive

  in environments managed by humans but cause them to struggle in the

  wild. A familiar example of this is the way that corn (or maize, Zea mays)

  plants no longer have an effective mechanism for seed dispersal because

  the seeds stay tightly clustered on the cob.

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  In this chapter we will address the question: Are honey bees truly do-

  mesticated? This is an important question, because to answer it we must

  examine the special relationship that exists between honey bees and human

  beings. To begin, let us note that while it is true that Apis mellifera is often

  included in lists of the 18 or so animal species that are domesticated, and

  while it is also true that beekeepers own and control (somewhat) their

  bees, the human- animal relationship for honey bees is fundamentally dif-

  ferent from that for cattle, chickens, horses, and other farm animals. In all

  these species, selection is steered almost entirely by human hands for life

  in man- made environments and with human assistance. In honey bees,

  however, selection is still steered mainly by natural selection for life in

  natural environments and without human assistance. We will see the evi-

  dence of this again and again throughout this book: the honey bee remains

  superbly adapted for living on its own in the wild.

  THE PATH TOWARD DOMESTICATION

  The bas- relief sculptures depicting beekeeping in the Egyptian temple to

  the sun god Re at Abū Jirāb (Fig. 3.3) show us that honey bees were already

  living under the care of people some 4,000 years ago, but these sculptures

  do not reveal when the first steps were taken toward domesticating the

  honey bee. They do, however, provide a clue: the sophistication of the

  beekeeping activities depicted in these sculptures—the skilled use of

  smoke and the careful sealing of storage vessels—indicates that the origins

  of beekeeping must predate these sculptures. The latest evidence on this

  matter comes from archaeologists who have reported compelling evidence

  of widespread exploitation of Apis mellifera in the earliest farming com-

 
munities in the Middle East. Specifically, they have found the chemical

  fingerprint of beeswax on many fragments of pottery vessels collected

  from the sites of prehistoric farming communities in Anatolia (a region

  within eastern Turkey) that date to 9,000 years before present. Honey bees

  were probably important to these early farmers both for their honey—

  a rare sweetener for them—and for their beeswax, which probably had

  technological, cosmetic, and medicinal applications. Given that the close

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  Are Honey Bees Domesticated? 81

  association between human beings and honey bees dates back to the onset

  of agriculture, it is likely that honey bees, along with sheep and goats, were

  among the first creatures to start moving down a path toward domestica-

  tion when agriculture emerged and spread out of Anatolia and the Fertile

  Crescent about 10,000 years ago.

  What might have motivated ancient farmers to start keeping colonies

  of honey bees near their homes and under their care? Perhaps the first

  beekeepers were individuals who especially enjoyed the delectable honey

  they knew was hidden away in the nests of these mysterious little crea-

  tures. There can be no doubt that whenever one of our Neolithic ancestors

  bit into a chunk of honeycomb, tasted its dizzying sweetness, and smelled

  the appealing aroma of the honey oozing forth, he or she had an intensely

  pleasurable experience. Perhaps this was even a joyous experience, since

  golden honey was the only strong sweet known to these people. I suspect

  that when Moses, some 3,500 years ago, reported God’s promise to the

  wandering Israelites to deliver them to “a land flowing with milk and

  honey,” his words had a significance that we cannot appreciate fully today,

  given how much cane sugar, high- fructose corn syrup, honey, maple syrup,

  and other sweeteners we now consume.

  To understand fully the origins of beekeeping, though, we must con-

  sider not just the strong motives possessed by the earliest beekeepers but

  also the opportunities for domestication provided by the bees—of which

  there are two. Each is a behavioral trait that predisposed honey bees to

  start living around humans that had settled into an agricultural way of life.