Figure 1
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A drawing on the wall of a cave in eastern Spain may be the most ancient
record of the association between humans and honey bees. The drawing, perhaps
as much as 9000 years old, depicts a human figure scaling a ladder to gather
honeycomb from a hive of wild bees (Figure 1). Other cave paintings from
the same era have been found in Natal and Zimbabwe, South Africa, suggesting
that a knowledge of bees and honey may have been widespread among primitive
tribes of hunter-gatherers.
Robbing wild beehives is a risky venture, and although it is still practiced
in some parts of the world, humans eventually found better ways to manage
bees and harvest honey. The first steps toward modern apiculture
(the art and craft of beekeeping) probably involved tending wild hives
or providing natural cavities (such as hollow logs) for the bees to use
as nestsites.
By 4000 BC, people in China and Egypt had learned to keep
bees in artificial hives made of pottery or woven from straw (Figure 2).
In time, they also learned to capture swarms, to pacify the bees with smoke
from a torch, to replace an aging queen with a younger one, and to protect
a hive from predation and disease. But despite much experimentation, the
hives themselves were little more than hollow cavities where bees were
encouraged to build their honeycomb. All such hives, many of which are
still in use throughout the world, share a common disadvantage: the comb
must be damaged or destroyed in order to inspect the brood (larvae and
pupae) or remove the honey. Various methods have been used to minimize
this damage, but none were entirely successful at preventing it.
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The era of modern apiculture began in 1851 when the Rev. L. L. Langstroth,
a Pennsylvania minister and part-time beekeeper, designed and built the
first beehive with frames that could be easily removed to gather honey
without disturbing the main brood of the hive. This achievement was based
largely on Langstroth's own discovery that bees leave a space of precisely
10 mm (3/8 inch) between each section of their honeycomb -- instinctively
sealing smaller gaps with propolis (bee glue) and filling larger ones with
more honeycomb. This optimal distance, which has come to be known as the
"bee space", gives worker bees just enough room to move around easily on
the comb surface.
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Langstroth's hive, built so that all structural components would be
separated by a 10 mm gap, became the prototype for most of the beehives
used in the United States today. A modern hive (right)
consists of
a rectangular box, called the brood chamber, filled with vertical frames
that hang from ledges on opposite sides of the box. Each frame initially
contains a beeswax "foundation", supplied by the beekeeper, on which the
bees build their comb to rear brood and store honey. A second box (called
a super) rests on top of the brood chamber. It also contains vertical frames
with foundation, but it is often separated from the brood chamber by a
screen grid, called a queen excluder, that keeps the large-bodied queen
from crawling into the super to lay eggs. Workers are small enough to squeeze
through the excluder, so they build wax cells and store honey in the frames
of the super. A beekeeper can harvest the honey without disturbing the
brood by simply opening the top of the hive and pulling frames out of the
super.
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