Plan Bee by Susan Brackney

Author:Susan Brackney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Wildlife: Butterflies, Other Insects & Spiders
Publisher: Hay House Publishing
Published: 2010-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

Lorenzo Langstroth was an American beekeeper who popularized the movable frame-style hive.

To make up for those frequent losses, searching out and collecting honey and bees from wild nests was deeply ingrained in colonial culture; just as they depended upon chickens and other livestock, the colonialists relied on honeybees, too, to help them get through hard times. In fact, bee trees were so prevalent in early America that honey hunting very nearly became its own sport. Frequently engaged in good-natured competition with one another, bee tree trackers competed to see who among them had the keenest eyesight, the swiftest feet, and the easiest time navigating the wilderness. But in light of the South’s multiplying cotton plantations and the industrialization of the North, forested land was harder to come by, and the pastime gradually died back.

At about the same time, beekeepers began to experiment with new “movable frame” hives, which allowed them to pull out and examine entire sections of honeycomb at a time. European inventors had started to tinker with these box-style hives as early as the late 1600s and 1700s, but an American beekeeper named Lorenzo Langstroth is one of the best known.8 Today, most modern hives—mine included—are essentially Langstroth hives or slight variations on his original design.

From a distance, the modern beehive’s wooden boxes look like dresser drawers missing their knobs. Really, though, each of these “drawers” has neither knobs nor bottoms. In beekeeping parlance they’re known as “supers,” and stacked one on top of the next, each individual super usually contains 10 rectangular frames full of honeycomb and bees.9 Langstroth’s original hive—and the hives of several inventors including Russia’s Peter Prokopovich and England’s Augustus Munn—took into account the idea that bees are very particular about their space.10 If there is too much room between individual frames in a super—say, more than a half inch—honeybees will automatically close the distance by filling it with extra honeycomb. And if there is extra space between the outside frames and the inside wall of the super? Bees will fill that, too, with more honeycomb or, sometimes, with propolis, making the removal of single frames for inspection messy and difficult.

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