“Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?”
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Beeswax appears in many of my cosmetic recipes, and I include it in the blend of waxes that I use to make candles. As beeswax is an animal product, that means my cosmetics and candles are not suitable for vegans. I’ve started experimenting with recipes that don’t include beeswax so that I have something to offer vegans, but I don’t plan to abandon the use of beeswax. It’s just too useful.
For now, suffice it to say that the uses of beeswax include:
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- Emulsifier
- Preservative
- Modelling material
- In casting metals
- Sealant
- Lubricant
- Fuel.
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I’ll return to the uses of beeswax in a later post. For the remainder of this post, I want to explore the relationship between humans and the bees that produce beeswax.
Beeswax is produced by honeybees, insects of the genus Apis. Although enormously useful, beeswax is mostly regarded as a by-product of harvesting honey.
Destructive Honey Foraging
Humans and other predators have been plundering bee colonies for honey for as long as there have been bees. The story has not been a happy one for the bees, at least not until the last couple of hundred years. There was no way to harvest honey (and beeswax) without killing the bee colony.
Early beekeeping consisted of capturing individual bee swarms in the Spring and keeping them in artificial hives. The hives used in Europe were made of straw or wicker and called skeps. The beekeeper would leave the bees to their own devices during the Summer and then smoke or burn out the bee colonies to harvest the honey.
A Better Way
The story bee-friendly beekeeping is an international one. Many of the significant developments occurred in different countries around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There was limited communication between the pioneers, so there is some duplication of discovery and invention.
François Huber
François Huber is credited with detailed observation of honeybees and interpreting their behaviour. His achievements are especially remarkable because he was blind by the age of 15. He worked by directing and questioning his wife Marie and a servant, François Burnens. In 1789 he developed a hive in which each comb was enclosed with glass sides, similar to modern observation hives. The combs were arranged so that they could be opened like the pages of a book. It was called the Leaf Hive.
Huber’s findings were published in French in Geneva in 1792. The title of the book (in translation) is “New Observations on Bees” and it ran to 800 pages. It was soon translated into English and German. A commentary on this book appears in Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”.
Petro Prokopovych
A retired Ukrainian army officer named Petro Prokopovych became a beekeeper after resigning his commission. He observed and studied his bees very closely, and developed practices and physical inventions that reduced the damage and disturbance inflicted on bees by their beekeepers. In 1814 Prokopovych is credited with inventing the first removable frame hive. His hive made it easier to harvest honey while reducing damage to the bee colony.
Prokopovych observed that the queen bee in a colony, upon which the colony is dependent for survival, is slightly larger than the other bees. By using a screen with holes too small for the queen to pass, but large enough for the other bees, it was possible to confine the queen to a separate part of the hive. Honey could be harvested from one part of the hive while the queen, eggs and juvenile bees were confined to the other part. These screens are now known as Queen Excluders and appear in modern hives.
Johann Dzierżon
Johann Dzierżon was a Catholic priest in Silesia, in Poland. He was honoured around the world in his lifetime for his beekeeping discoveries and inventions. One of his most significant discoveries was known as “bee space” – the gap that bees leave between combs to allow themselves access. This is used to calculate the spacing between removable frames in a modern beehive. Dzierżon implemented his discovery in a removable frame hive that was based on Huber’s Leaf hive.
Lorenzo Langstroth
Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth was an American clergyman. He was aware of François Huber’s discoveries. Langstroth made many contributions to modern beekeeping. He has been credited with identifying bee-space, but this already formed the basis of European hive designs based on Dzierżon’s findings.
Langstroth is best known for the invention of a top-opening hive containing removable frames. He patented this design in 1852. Langstroth hives are still manufactured and used today. The design forms the basis of almost all modern hives.
Modern Beehives
The use of skeps is limited now. Some countries have outlawed them. A few beekeepers still use them as a lightweight container for collecting swarms, transferring the swarm to a modern hive afterwards.
Most modern beehives are based upon Langstroth’s designs. Hives built to Langstroth’s design are still commercially available. Two Men and a Little Farm provide my favourite description of a hive, its components and their uses.
Using a modern beehive, a beekeeper can harvest honey without disturbing the comb where the queen lays eggs and bees are reared. The beekeeper can return the comb to the hive after removing the honey, so the bees can re-use it. This means the bees don’t have to divert effort from honey production to produce wax to build combs.
In return for the honey that they harvest, beekeepers inspect beehives for infections and parasites. While almost all beekeepers wear protective suits and headgear, many don’t wear gloves (like the beekeeper in the image above). They argue that this encourages them to be very gently with their bees, minimising the impact of their interventions.
Where possible, beekeepers treat disease or infestations. In extreme situations they will destroy a bee colony and burn the hive to prevent disease spreading to other hives. They transport hives to areas where pollen and nectar are plentiful, at the same time ensuring crops are pollenated. During the Winter, they ensure their bees have sufficient food to survive, providing sugar syrup if the bees’ reserves of honey are insufficient.
Beekeepers are no longer a threat to honeybees. Their role has turned to protecting bee colonies. As honeybees have become domesticated, the threats to them from predators, parasites and disease have diminished. The new threats are environmental, from pollution and pesticides.