HOW BEES HAVE ALWAYS LIVED

Bees have been around for a long time. Most of that time, literally millions of years, they have built their hives on their own, in hollow trees or caves, or even sometimes in the open.

Humans have been stealing their honey for perhaps fifteen thousand years. No, I have no personal recollection of that, but that is what people who study such things tell me.

People appear to have been “keeping” bees in some form or another for about four thousand years. There are historical records from Egypt and even older civilizations that make reference to beekeeping operations. But for most of that time, beekeeping mostly just consisted of providing a hollow log of straw skep. The bees themselves were usually killed each year in order to extract the honey.

It wasn’t until 1851, about one hundred and sixty years ago, that Lorenzo Langstroth invented the modern bee hive with moveable frames. This invention allowed easy manipulation of the bees and extraction of excess honey without destroying the bees. But this hive is not a large departure from their normal wild existence, and bees seemed to thrive just fine.

In 1851 the majority of people still lived a rural existence, closely tied to agriculture and the land. Even those who lived in small towns usually had gardens and often domestic animals. Not everyone kept bees, but many did.

Bee keeping, for the next one hundred years after the Langstroth hive, was a modest affair with a few hives set aside on a corner of many farms, and mostly just ignored until honey harvest. Requeening had to occur every few years, but it was not religiously attended to because the bees did pretty well on their own. Farming was basically a nurturing activity, not the extractive activity it has become today. Bees were valued for their pollination, honey and wax for candles. They were not yet an industry.

But that has all changed in the past few years. In my next post I will explore the massive changes that have occurred very rapidly in the last few years.