Beehive
A beehive is an enclosed structure in which honey bees raise their young and produce honey as part of their seasonal cycle. Although the word beehive is used to describe the nest of any bee colony, scientific and professional literature distinguishes nest from hive. Nest is used to discuss colonies that house themselves in natural or artificial cavities or in structures that are hanging and exposed. The term hive is used to describe a man made structure created to house a honey bee colony. While species of Apis live in colonies, the western and eastern honey bees are the main species kept in artificial beehives.
The hive's internal structure is a densely packed group of hexagonal prismatic cells made of beeswax, called a honeycomb. The bees use the cells to store food and to house the brood.
Beehives are used by humans for producing honey, ensuring pollination of crops, housing bees for apitherapy treatment, and mitigating the effects of colony collapse disorder. In North America, hives are commonly transported between farms so bees can pollinate various crops during their specific blooming periods.
Several patents have been issued for beehive designs.
Honey bee nests
Honey bees use caves, rock cavities, and hollow trees as natural nesting sites. In warmer climates, they may build exposed hanging nests; members of other subgenera have exposed aerial combs. Multiple parallel honeycombs form the nest with a relatively uniform bee space. Nests typically have a single entrance. Western honey bees prefer nest cavities approximately in volume and avoid those smaller than or larger than. Western honey bees show several nest-site preferences: the height above ground is usually between and, entrance positions tend to face downward, equatorial-facing entrances are favored, and nest sites over from the parent colony are preferred. Most bees occupy nests for several years.The bees often smooth the bark surrounding the nest entrance and coat the cavity walls with a thin layer of hardened plant resin called propolis. Honeycombs are attached to the walls along the cavity tops and sides, but the bees leave passageways along the comb edges. The standard nest architecture for all honeybees is similar: honey is stored in the upper part of the comb; beneath it are rows of pollen-storage cells, worker-brood cells, and drone-brood cells, in that order. The peanut-shaped queen cells are normally built at the lower edge of the comb.
Ancient hives
In antiquity, Egyptians kept bees in manmade hives. The walls of the Egyptian sun temple of Nyuserre Ini from the 5th Dynasty, dated earlier than 2422 BCE, depict workers blowing smoke into hives as they remove honeycombs. Inscriptions detailing honey production are found on the tomb of Pabasa from the 26th Dynasty, and describe honey stored in jars and cylindrical hives.The archaeologist Amihai Mazar cites 30 intact hives that were discovered in the ruins of Tel Rehov, located in modern-day Israel. This is evidence that an advanced honey industry existed in Canaan approximately 4,000 years ago. The 150 beehives, many broken, were made of straw and unbaked clay. They were found in orderly rows. Ezra Marcus from the University of Haifa said the discovery provided a glimpse of ancient beekeeping seen in texts and ancient art from the Near East. An altar decorated with fertility figurines was found alongside the hives and may indicate religious practices associated with beekeeping. While beekeeping predates these ruins, this is the oldest apiary yet discovered.
Traditional hives
Traditional beehives provided an enclosure for the bee colony. Because no internal structures were provided for the bees, they created their honeycomb within the hives. The comb is often cross-attached and cannot be moved without destroying it. This is sometimes called a fixed-frame hive to differentiate it from the modern movable-frame hives. Harvest often destroyed the hives, though some adaptations were using top baskets which could be removed when the bees filled them with honey. These were gradually supplanted with box hives of varying dimensions, with or without frames, and finally replaced by newer modern equipment.Honey from traditional hives was extracted by pressing – crushing the wax honeycomb to squeeze out the contents. Due to this harvesting, traditional beehives provided more beeswax, but far less honey than a modern hive.
Four styles of traditional beehives are mud hives, clay/tile hives, skeps, and bee gums.
Mud hives
Mud hives are still used in Egypt and Siberia. These are long cylinders made from a mixture of unbaked mud, straw, and dung.Clay hives
tiles were the customary homes of kept bees in the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Long cylinders of baked clay were used in ancient Egypt, the Middle East, and to some extent in Greece, Italy, and Malta. They sometimes were used singly, but more often stacked in rows to provide some shade, at least for those not on top. Keepers would smoke one end to drive the bees to the other end while they harvested honey.Skeps
Skeps, baskets placed open-end-down, have been used to house bees for some 2000 years. Believed to have been first used in Ireland, they were initially made from wicker plastered with mud and dung but after the Middle Ages, almost all were made of straw. In northern and western Europe, skeps were made of coils of grass or straw. In its simplest form, there is a single entrance at the bottom of the skep. Again, there is no internal structure provided for the bees and the colony must produce its honeycomb, which is attached to the inside of the skep. The size of early modern skeps was about two pecks to a bushel.Skeps have two major flaws: beekeepers cannot inspect the comb for diseases and pests, and honey removal is difficult and often results in the destruction of the entire colony. To get the honey beekeepers either drove the bees out of the skep or, by using a bottom extension called an eke or a top extension called a cap, sought to create a comb with only honey in it. Quite often the bees were killed, sometimes using lighted sulfur, to allow the honeycomb to be removed. Skeps could also be squeezed in a vise to extract the honey.
Later skep designs included a smaller woven basket on top over a small hole in the main skep. This cap acted as a crude super, allowing some honey to be extracted with less destruction of brood and bees. In England, such an extension piece consisting of a ring of about 4 or 5 coils of straw placed below a straw beehive to give extra room for brood rearing was called an eke, imp, or nadir. An eke was used to give just a bit of extra room, or to "eke" some more space, a nadir is a larger extension used when a full story was needed beneath.
The term is derived from Old Norse skeppa, "basket". A person who made such woven beehives was called a "skepper", a surname that still exists in Western countries. In England the thickness of the coil of straw was controlled using a ring of leather or a piece of cow's horn called a "girth" and the coils of straw could be sewn together using strips of briar. Likenesses of skeps can be found in paintings, carvings, and old manuscripts. The skep is often used on signs as an indication of industry.
In the late 18th century, more complex skeps appeared with wooden tops with holes in them over which glass jars were placed. The comb would then be built into the glass jars, making the designs commercially attractive.
As of 1998, most US states prohibited the use of skeps, or any other hive that cannot be inspected for disease and parasites.
Bee gums
In the eastern United States, especially in the Southeast, sections of hollow trees were used until the 20th century. These were called "gums" because they often were from black gum trees.Sections of the hollow trees were set upright in "bee yards" or apiaries. Sometimes sticks or crossed sticks were placed under a board cover to give an attachment for the honeycomb. As with skeps, the harvest of honey from these often destroyed the colony. Often the harvester would kill the bees before even opening their nest. This was done by inserting a metal container of burning sulfur into the gum.
Natural tree hollows and artificially hollowed tree trunks were widely used in the past by beekeepers in Central Europe. For example, in Poland, such a beehive was called a barć and was protected in various ways from unfavorable weather conditions and predators. Harvest of honey from these did not destroy the colony, as only a protective piece of wood was removed from the opening and smoke was used to pacify the bees for a short time. Spain still uses cork bark cylinder with cork top hives, similar to a gum or barć,
Part of the reason why bee gums are still used is that this allows the producers of the honey to distinguish themselves from other honey producers and to ask for a higher price for the honey. An example where bee gums are still used is Mont-Lozère, France, although in Europe they are referred to as log hives. The length of these log hives used is shorter than bee gums; they are hollowed out artificially and cut to a specific size.
Other kinds
In New Zealand, native Māori beekeepers, after the arrival of Europeans and their non-native honey bees, applied their skills of weaving baskets further into making hives of similar structure made from straw.Modern hives
The earliest recognizably modern designs of beehives arose in the 19th century, though they were perfected from intermediate stages of progress made in the 18th century.Intermediate stages in hive design were recorded for example by Thomas Wildman in 1768-1770, who described advances over the destructive old skep-based beekeeping so that the bees no longer had to be killed to harvest the honey. Wildman, for example, fixed a parallel array of wooden bars across the top of a straw hive or skep "so that there are in all seven bars of deal" "to which the bees fix their combs". He also described using such hives in a multi-story configuration, foreshadowing the modern use of supers: he described adding successive straw hives below, and eventually removing the ones above when free of brood and filled with honey so that the bees could be separately preserved at the harvest for the following season. Wildman also described a further development, using hives with "sliding frames" for the bees to build their comb, foreshadowing more modern uses of movable-comb hives. Wildman acknowledged the advances in knowledge of bees previously made by Swammerdam, Maraldi, and de Reaumur – he included a lengthy translation of Reaumur's account of the natural history of bees – and he also described the initiatives of others in designing hives for the preservation of bee-life when taking the harvest, citing in particular reports from Brittany dating from the 1750s, due to Comte de la Bourdonnaye.
In 1814 Petro Prokopovych, the founder of commercial beekeeping in Ukraine, invented one of the first beehive frames which allowed an easier honey harvest.
The correct distance between combs for easy operations in beehives was described in 1845 by Jan Dzierżon as from the center of one top bar to the center of the next one. In 1848, Dzierżon introduced grooves into the hive's side walls replacing the strips of wood for moving top bars. The grooves were, the spacing later termed bee space.
Based on the aforementioned measurements, August Adolph von Berlepsch in Thuringia and L.L. Langstroth in the United States designed their own movable-frame hives. Langstroth used, however "about 1/2 inch" above the frame's top bars and "about 3/8 inch" between the frames and hive body.
Hives can be vertical or horizontal. There are three main types of modern hive in common use worldwide:
- the Langstroth hive
- the top-bar hive
- the Warre hive