Collector's Items

Bees make propolis. This is a mixture of resin gathered from trees, wax created by the bees themselves and enzymes they have secreted. It is magical stuff - anti-bacterial and anti-fungal, it helps keep the colony healthy. It's a bit like old-fashioned toffee: sticky and malleable when warm and fresh, hard and brittle when older and cold

Bees love it so much they put it everywhere: lining the individual brood cells; filling any draugty gaps in the hive wall; sticking together separate parts of the hive, or sticking adjacent frames to one-another. Sometimes they just put random lumps of it on the hive wall, just for fun (or art?). All good fun, until we want to inspect the bees

A hive is a stack of top-less, bottom-less boxes, without anything fastening each box to the ones above or below. They are just held in place by gravity and friction. Well, that is the case until the hive has bees in, at which point they spot the (possibly leaky) junctions between the boxes and pack them with propolis. When the beekeeper returns a few days later, the top box is stuck fast to the one below, which is stuck fast to the one below, which is... Striking a box to knock it free is not an option, unless you want to be the target of the collective anger of several thousand stinging insects

Once you get into a box, you want to remove a single frame to examine it. Same problem: it is stuck to the next one, which is stuck to the next one... and so on.

The solution is to use something that you can push between a corner of two boxes to prise them apart as gently as possible. To extract a frame, you put something in the gap between the lugs on the top corners of adjacent frames, and twist it slowly to force them apart by 10 or 20mm - you might need to do both sides, but one is often enough to loosen both ends. Sometimes the lugs of a frame are also stuck to the ledge on which they are resting and, in a tight space, it might be necessary to pull a frame upwards, as well as separating it from its neighbour - not always easy with (propolis coated!) fingers

For the first few decades after the Rev Langstroth invented the modern moveable-frame hive, beekeepers seem to have used the tools they had to hand for other jobs: screwdrivers, knives, scrapers, the 'flat' side of a hammer, whatever. Then, around the turn of the 20th century, capitalism kicked in, and someone decided that there was money to be made by selling a specific multi-tool to do all the tasks required. Quite how this started is not well documented - I have read that the first design was based on a tool that was used by people in the US when maintaining the clapper-board houses that are much more common there (but I can't now find my source)

However it came about exactly, the 'hive tool' was born, and almost every beekeeper now has a selection of them and would not contemplate doing an inspection without one (except when you are miles from home and have left them all behind - been there, done that). It is a necessary skill for every beekeeper to be able to hold a hive tool in one hand and, at the same time, lift boxes, take out frames, manipulate and turn them for inspection, move the bees around the frame, rearrange frames, and put the whole thing back together with the tool still safely in your palm

The flat, tapered bits of the tools can be pushed between boxes, or positioned between frames, the hooked bits go under the frame lugs, and the little notch means they can be levered against the adjacent frame, the curved flanges on a couple of them make excellent scrapers for removing excess propolis from anywhere the bees have put it. The hole, or hole with notch, is a bit of a mystery. Some people use it to hang them up, but it has no purpose when working a hive. The clapper-board house theory said it was part of the original tool, used for removing old nails from the boards. On that basis, it is part of a hive tool because, well, it's always been part of a hive tool