A Hive Frame.

On Sunday, a friend informed me that some of his colonies were about to throw off some swarms and asked if I would like one of them. I've been without bees of my own for several years (it's a long story involving me becoming allergic to bee venom); rashly, I even went as far as selling most of my equipment and bees, and the remnant picked up a nasty virus and succumbed. I had bought replacement hives but they needed to be made up. This evening I finished populating the first one with frames and foundation ready to be delivered tomorrow morning. With luck, I shall have a new colony within a week or so.

It was the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth  of Philadelphia who, in 1852, invented and patented the movable frame hive which is still in use, mostly in the U.S.A. The design is based on the concept of the bee space and, although many hive designs had previously used this principle, it fell to Langstroth to come up with the fundamental idea on which nearly all modern hives are designed. The movable frame enabled the manipulations of bee colonies that enable the control disease and of swarming and thus, the beekeeper can control whether the colony produces a crop of bees or one of honey.

The bee space is generally considered to be the space that allows two bees to pass, back to back, on adjacent combs and the dimension is taken to be 6 m.m. Any gap larger than this, the bees will use to build extra honeycomb which is a real pain for the beekeeper, while a smaller gap will be filled with propolis (the bee version of plaster), another real pain. This description is, however, an over simplification as the bees tend to respect any space between 4 m.m. and 9 m.m. with the latter being the actual space at which bees can pass. Other spaces can be used in various parts of the hive for different purposes, for example: a gap of 4.3 m.m will prevent the passage of both queens and drones and is used to stop either from accessing the honey area.

Five years after the appearance of the removable frame hive, the German, Johannes Mehring invented wax sheet embossed with the honeycomb pattern known to beekeepers as "foundation." By encouraging the bees to build uniform comb, this advanced the efficiency of the colony and is considered to be one of the most important developments in modern bee management.

I’ve just posted Sunday’s, “Barbecue Queen.”