Beekeeping Trivia

Pat here with your daily dose of fascinating but useless history trivia—on beekeeping. As a gardener, I’m painfully aware of modern problems in keeping bees alive. At the moment, we’re nurturing an avocado tree with weird fruiting habits that require lots of bees at just the right time, and we’re not having much success. Historically, farmers didn’t grow plants requiring that much fuss, but they did need bees to improve their crops, even if they didn’t know it. Mostly, though, our ancestors saw bees as a means to fill their coffers.

Beekeeping was well established as a process well before the Romans invaded Britain way back in AD 43. Domesticated beekeeping had been around in Egypt and China a few thousand years earlier. We don’t know exactly what early Britains knew, although they undoubtedly knew how to use hollowed-out tree stumps and fallen logs. The Romans understood how to use more sophisticated methods like beehives, honeypots, and how to smoke bees to calm them.

Although we have early examples of skeps to house a hive, it wasn’t until the medieval era that we have complete texts explaining these more “modern” techniques. There is a 10^th century book called Geoponika that shows people had been studying bee habits for a long time. They recognized that bees had leaders (although, of course, they called them kings) and different activities.  It describes hives with ventilation made of particular woods and size. It recommends honey and wine for young bees and barley cakes in winter. The detailed instructions are amazing—because honey and wax production were extremely profitable and worth studying.

By the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the skep, or basket hive, had become traditional. Basically a baked clay pot or ring of straw for the bees to attach the honeycomb to, it was protected in winter by conical wood hackles. In spring, they’d remove the hackle and smoke out or drown the colony to recover the honey. That honey, along with the beeswax, was often traded for rent to landlords or tithes to the church.

But smoking and drowning killed the colony! Apparently there were enough bees around at the time that they didn’t worry too much about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But, of course, my psychic beekeeper in ENTRANCING THE EARL cannot bear to kill her bees, because she talks to them, and they talk back. “Telling the bees” is an old European tradition where a member of the household reports births, marriages, and deaths to the hives, presumably reassuring the bees that all will go on as before, so they don’t quit producing honey or die. It’s theorized this practice comes from Celtic mythology about bees being the link between our world and the spirit world, which of course fits right in with my druidic Malcolms.

So my heroine is desperate to learn about the new hives invented by the American Reverend L. L. Langstroth that allow her to save the bees. She’s read a pamphlet and worked out how to carry her queen with her when she runs away from the stepfather who wants to sell her title with marriage, but she wants to build a hive she doesn’t have to burn. Langstroth’s system of boxes were made to unique specifications that kept the honeycomb accessible and allowed the excess honey to flow into a separate box. It is the same basic system used today, but it was almost unknown at the time of my story. So once my heroine finds my hero, who has access to libraries where she might find Langstroth’s book, she burrows in—like a queen bee in a hollow log. <G> The fact that he’s allergic to her bees is totally irrelevant, right?

More detailed history about the Langstroth Hive and about bees.

And our Anne did a lovely, more detailed post about bees and her childhood.

How do you feel about bees? Are you allergic like my hero? As a child, I was terrified of them, but now I study anything I put on my garden to be certain it doesn’t harm bees. With so much conflicting information, it isn’t easy!