Our Farm and Beekeeping

Beekeeping

Beekeeping (or apiculture, from Latin apis, bee) is the maintenance of honey bee colonies, commonly in hives, by humans. A beekeeper (or apiarist) keeps bees in order to collect honey and beeswax, for the purpose of pollinating crops, or to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers. A location where bees are kept is called an apiary.

Invention of the moveable comb hive

Early forms of honey collecting entailed the destruction of the entire colony when the honey was harvested. The wild hive was crudely broken into, using smoke to suppress the bees, the honeycombs were torn out and smashed up - along with the eggs, larvae and honey they contained. The liquid honey from the destroyed brood nest was crudely strained through a sieve or basket. This was destructive and unhygienic but for hunter-gatherer societies this did not matter, since the honey was generally consumed immediately and there were always more wild colonies to exploit. However, in settled societies, the destruction of the bee colony meant the loss of a valuable resource; this drawback persisted until the 19th Century, which made beekeeping both inefficient and something of a 'stop and start' activity. There could be no continuity of production and no possibility of selective breeding, since each bee colony was destroyed at harvest time, along with its precious queen. During the medieval period abbeys and monasteries were centers of beekeeping since beeswax was highly prized for candles and fermented honey was used to make alcoholic mead in areas of Europe where vines would not grow.

The 19th Century saw a revolution in beekeeping practice through the invention and perfection of the 'movable comb hive' by Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, an Italian immigrant to the United States. Langstroth was the first person to make practical use of Huber's earlier discovery that there was a specific spatial measurement between the wax combs, later called 'the bee space', which bees would not block with wax, but kept as a free passage. Having determined this 'bee space' (between 5 -8 mm), Langstroth then designed a series of wooden frames within a rectangular hive box, carefully maintaining the correct bee space between successive frames, and found that the bees would build parallel honeycombs in the box without bonding them to each other or to the hive walls. This enables the beekeeper to slide any frame out of the hive for inspection, without harming the bees or the comb, protecting the eggs, larvae and pupae contained within the cells. It also meant that combs containing honey could be gently removed and the honey extracted without destroying the comb. The emptied honey combs could then be returned to the bees intact for refilling. Langstroth's classic book, The Hive and Honey-bee, published in 1853, described his rediscovery of the bee space and the development of his patent moveable comb hive.

Traditional Beekeeping

There are considerable regional variations in the type of hive in which bees are kept. A hive is a set of rectangular wooden boxes filled with moveable wood or plastic frames, each of which holds a sheet of wax or plastic foundation. The bees build cells upon the sheets of foundation to create complete honeycombs. Foundation comes in two cell-sizes: worker foundation - which enables the bees to create small, hexagonal worker cells and 'drone foundation' which allows the bees to build much larger cells - drone cells, for the production of male bees. The bottom box, or brood chamber, contains the queen and most of the bees; the upper boxes, or supers, contain just honey. Only the young nurse bees can produce wax flakes which they secrete from between their abdominal plates; they build honeycomb using the artificial wax foundation as a starting point, after which they may raise brood or deposit honey and pollen in the cells of the comb. These frames can be freely manipulated and honey supers with frames full of honey can be taken and extracted for their honey crop.

Types of Beekeepers

Beekeepers generally categorize themselves as:
* Commercial ; Beekeeping is the primary source of income.
* Sideliner ; Beekeeping is a secondary source of income.
* Hobbyist ; Beekeeping is not a significant source of income.