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 other
products of the hive (including beeswax, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly), to pollinate crops, or to produce bees for sale to other
beekeepers. A location where bees are kept is called an apiary or "bee yard".
Depictions of humans collecting
honey from wild bees date to 15,000 years ago, efforts to domesticate them are
shown in Egyptian art around 4,500 years ago. Simple hives and smoke were used
and honey was stored in jars, some of which were found in the tombs of pharaohs such as Tutankhamun. It wasn't until the 18th century
that European understanding of the colonies and biology of bees allowed the
construction of the moveable comb hive so that honey could be harvested without
destroying the entire colony.
History of beekeeping
At some point humans began to attempt to
domesticate wild bees in artificial hives made from hollow logs, wooden boxes, pottery
vessels, and woven straw baskets or "skeps".
Honeybees were kept in Egypt from antiquity.[2] On the walls of the sun
temple of Nyuserre Ini from the Fifth
Dynasty, before 2422 BCE, workers are depicted blowing smoke into
hives as they are removing honeycombs.[3][4] Inscriptions detailing the production of honey
are found on the tomb of Pabasa from the Twenty-sixth
Dynasty (c. 650 BCE), depicting
pouring honey in jars and cylindrical hives.[5] Sealed pots of honey were found in the grave
goods of pharaohs such as Tutankhamun.
Modern
beekeeping
Movable frame hives
In the United States, the Langstroth hive is commonly used. The Langstroth was
the first successful top-opened hive with movable frames, and other designs of
hive have been based on it. The Langstroth hive was, however, a descendant of Jan
Dzierzon’s Polish hive
designs. In the United Kingdom, the most common type of hive is the British
National Hive, which can hold Hoffman, British Standard or popular Manley
frames, but it is not unusual to see some other sorts of hive (Smith,
Commercial and WBC, rarely Langstroth). Straw skeps,
bee gums, and unframed box hives are now unlawful in most US states, as the
comb and brood cannot be inspected for diseases. However, straw skeps are still used for collecting swarms by
hobbyists in the UK, before moving them into standard hives.
Natural beekeeping
The natural beekeeping movement
believes that modern beekeeping and agricultural practices, such as crop
spraying, hive movement, frequent hive inspections, artificial
insemination of
queens, routine medication, and sugar water feeding, weaken bee hives.
Practitioners of 'natural
beekeeping' tend to use variations of the top-bar hive, which is a simple
design that retains the concept of movable comb without the use of frames or
foundation. The horizontal top-bar hive, as championed by Marty Hardison,
Michael Bush, Philip Chandler, Dennis Murrell and others, can be seen as a
modernization of hollow log hives, with the addition of wooden bars of specific
width from which bees hang their combs. Its widespread adoption in recent years
can be attributed to the publication in 2007 of The Barefoot Beekeeper[23] by
Philip Chandler, which challenged many aspects of modern beekeeping and offered
the horizontal top-bar hive as a viable alternative to the ubiquitous
Langstroth-syle movable-frame hive
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