Tuesday 11 May 2021

Bee-keeping throughout history.

 We are becoming increasingly aware of how important bees are. Undoubtedly they are important for our food production: as well as supplying us with honey, their pollination activities are required by 30% of the world’s crops and 90% of all plants in the world. However, because of climate change, increasing use of pesticides as well as loss of habitat, the number of bee colonies is in decline.

Our neighbor has recently begun keeping bees, which prompted me to look a little closer at these beautiful, fascinating insects.

                                         

We see early depictions of man collecting honey from wild bees around 10, 000 years ago. He began to keep colonies of wild bees and wooden boxes, pottery vessels and straw baskets served as hives. The domestication of bees probably began around 4,500 years ago in Egypt as evidenced in their art form. Tomb inscriptions of around 650 BC outline in detail the production of honey, featuring cylindrical hives and jars containing honey. This was clearly a valuable commodity: sealed pots of honey were found in Tutenkhamun’s tomb. Below we see examples of 14th century hives.

                                                   


The Ancient Chinese were aware that the quality of honey was affected by the quality of wood used in the hive boxes. Around 2000 BC the Ancient Maya had actually domesticated a species of bee which was stingless and today such species are to be found in Australia.

In prehistoric Greece, apiculture was fairly well developed in the Mycenaean culture; in Knossos hives, smoking pots and instruments to extract honey were found. Later on, Aristotle outlined in-depth information about bees and bee-keeping.

 It was clearly, then, a valuable industry.

                                          

 However, early bee-keepers were destructive, using the same collecting methods as hungry bears. The wild hives were broken up and honeycomb was procured at the expense of everything else: eggs, larvae, the entire colony – all destroyed.

Perhaps the most important role in apiculture was that of the mediaeval monasteries, institutions which were then like universities in that they maintained great stores of knowledge. For the monks, bees’ wax was particularly important for their candle-making, while honey, as well as being a natural food-sweetener, was used to make mead, an alcoholic drink created by fermenting honey with water. In the 18th and 19th centuries, monks developed methods whereby bees’ lives were preserved during the harvesting process.

The Swiss naturalist, Francois Huber is generally regarded as the father of modern bee science. There were two major developments that greatly assisted beekeepers and their art.

1) Improved beehive design

This allowed for the parallel array across the hive of suspended wooden frames where the bees could fix the comb to be filled with honey; this comb could be removed with little disturbance for the bees.

 The bottom board holds the entrance to the hive and above it we see a series of boxes called supers. The deep super contains the queen, the bees and the babies. Above this is the excluder, to prevent the queen accessing the honey stores above, yet allowing the smaller worker bees to go back and forth about their business.                                   


The honey supers are their production units – and the bee-keeper’s harvest. Final covers protect the entire hive.2)The bee-space concept was the final development step. It was discovered that the distance between the suspended frames needed to be at least one centimetre.  A larger space would encourage the bees to build honeycomb, but a smaller space would be filled with propolis, a glue used to construct their hives. This was not preferable since it distracted bees from honey production and hampered the removal of the comb.

Delving into how a bee colony operates, we can appreciate the true complexity of nature!            

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