The “Modern” Beehive

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175 Years Old This Year

By: James E. Tew

The birth of the Langstroth Hive
I am not an apicultural historian but I am a longtime beekeeper. Compared to beekeeping’s extensive history, my bee experiences are only a tiny drop in a big, historic bee bucket.

I’ve always used what my beekeeper instructors called the “Modern Hive” designed by L.L. Langstroth in 1851 and patented in 1852. Depending on how you measure the development of this hive experience, either this year or next year, the modern Langstroth hive will be 175 years old. Is it possible to sing Happy Birthday to bee hive style?

Langstroth’s saga is long and contorted and beyond the scope of my modest effort here. It is interesting to note that he never made much income from his beekeeping-changing concept. It was too easy to copy the design without purchasing permission to use his ideas.

The original Langstroth design was a complicated contraption. Interestingly, the original design could not readily have additional supers added to the unit. The supers it contained were small and walled with clear viewing glass – an interesting but needless characteristic.

A.I. Root’s contribution
I feel a need to again write that I am not a historian. Let’s consider this piece to be a casual conversation and not a formal lecture. Having again written that admission, I now write that it was apparently A.I. Root, the original editor of this bee magazine and developer of The A.I. Root Company, who simplified the Langstroth hive design to make it manufacturable and easy to add extra space.

Who knows? In the complicated world of beekeeping history, maybe others were having the same – or similar ideas at the same time – but Root is usually given credit for the simplification.

Not a rapid transition
Years and years of tradition and technique do not always transition quickly. Though modern hives were available, many bee people continued to use the old ways for a long time.

In our early bee management years, we tried to manage “gum” yards that used cut sections of bee trees. It was an early type of U.S. beekeeping, but beekeepers slowly began to do better. There must still be such yards somewhere in the U.S. today; but I don’t know of a single such remaining yard. Been there — done that. They’ve all been transferred to Langstroth equipment and for good reason.

Box hives
Since nearly any dark and protected space could be made in a usable bee box, A simple hive design evolved where a 4-sided rectangular box with a simple top and bottom and a few notches for an entrance could readily be a homemade hive. This idea did not die easily.

Strangely, I feel a mutant sense of honor to have known box hive beekeepers, and I personally transferred bees from their natural comb design box hive to modern hive equipment. In my bee youth, I felt that the transferred bees must adore me for providing them such new, clean, modern living quarters. Dash that thought. I now realize that the transferred bees lost their natural hive design and had to adapt to an unnatural straight comb hive design. I am sensing that the transferred bees greatly preferred their simpler nest box.

I have personally destroyed about fifty of these old-styled boxes and I barely took even an occasional photo. Why would I? At the time, these crude boxes were just junk – nearly embarrassing. When beekeepers who used gums and box hives passed into history, along with them went the last common hive design that allowed the bees to use a natural bee nest design. I did my unintentional part in destroying the remaining part of a very old style of beekeeping.

Modern elemental beekeeping
The fundamentals of modern beehive management are built on: (1) a protective veil, (2) a smoke generator, (3) a pry bar, and (4) a “standard” beehive. Every beekeeper has these four basic pieces of equipment — every single one of them.

Veils
To protect face and eyes from painful stings, a coarse cloth was roughly wrapped around the head of the early beekeeper. Apparently, somewhere in time, someone stitched in piece of black screened wire in the front of the cloth. Though many veil designs exist today, the veil is essentially unchanged since its early evolution. It was only in the early 70s that fiberglass or plastic screened wire was used to replace the older metal screening which would seriously rust when it met beekeeper perspiration.

Smokers
The bee smoker was designed and patented by Moses Quimby in 1875. T.F. Bingham modified Moses’ design a bit, but beyond that, the design of the beehive smoker has changed little in 135 years. They are still smelly — even obnoxious — but modern beekeepers continue to look for the best fuel that will generate the best smoke from these time-tested devices.

Pry bar (hive tool)
Who knows what different tools have been used to pry frames from propolis-filled beehives? Screwdrivers and knives are certainly the most commonly improvised hive tools. Today, different designs exist, but after all is said, they are still just pry bars. A common hardware scraper device has become our classic hive tool.

The “Modern” Beehive
Of the four pieces of beekeeping equipment I have mentioned, only the modern beehive captures the very essence of beekeeping. I know, I know, the popular media insists on using the skep as the perpetual symbol for a beehive, but in the U.S., that picture is just plain wrong. The common wooden beehive is the pure image of beekeeping. It is the classic trademark of our industry and historically, we thank L.L. Langstroth for this foundation stone. I hope future Bee Culture authors will address the history and evolution of Langstroth’s hive far better than I am able to, so I leave that to them. My interest in this piece is the modern-day use of a device that has been little changed since it was patented about 175 years ago. Was Langstroth’s idea that good or have subsequent beekeepers just punched themselves out experimenting with new hive designs?

An imperfect relationship
I only speak for myself, but I have an imperfect relationship with our modern beehive design. On one hand, I love it and my very life is anchored by this simple wooden box. Just a few hours ago, upon returning home from a day trip, I noticed a beehive behind a house that I drive by at least twice a day. Has it been there all this time with foliage masking it? I don’t know and the answer is not important here. The point is that “I was looking.” In fact, on the entire one-hundred-mile ride I took, I was looking for unseen bee boxes. My entire family knew to sound a cry when a beehive was spotted. I may not know or even particularly care for the hive owner, but I feel that I know that hive and the bees in it. Anywhere in the world, when I see a beehive, it’s like seeing a friend — a familiar face. But here’s the oddity — this device that has been used for so long a time has been imperfect for all that time. Oscar Wilde said, “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.”

What if I suddenly had access to a radically new hive design — truly new, not just a tweaked adaption of Langstroth’s concept? Would that make me happier? I think not. You people are a clever lot. If there was truly a simpler design to be had, someone would have come up with it during the past 175 years. I suspect that a truly new hive design would have to be more technical, more complex, more chemically founded than the simple unit we all use now. As a young man, I loved to tinker with cars. As an older man, I would not touch today’s computer-driven vehicles. Such cars require a “technician” to repair them. My beehives are not perfect, but they are “the devil I know” and I want to keep them at my level of ingenuity.

Not perfect for either bees or beekeepers
The oddity is that our beehive design seems to be a truce of sorts between bees and beekeepers. Honey bees can live in modern hives, but they just as often will live in any suitable empty cavity. Through the years, whether or not we have actually helped the bees is an ongoing debate. I sense that the modern beehive is convenient for beekeepers to use and to manage, but apparently, it is not anything special to the bees. Bees persist in building combs their way. Either they have not read our bee books or there are biological reasons why bees want the contorted, twisted combs they naturally build. The photo screams something. I don’t know what.

Are the bees unable to build straight combs or do they just not want to build straight combs? In the photo, the bees had access to wood frames, plastic frames, and no frames. They were able to do something with all three options. Clearly, bees are resilient. No doubt, that adaptive behavior has helped honey bees essentially colonize the world. Are the bees thriving in my Langstroth hive or do they simply exist in my hive?

At this very moment, I have two small swarms that I picked in in my bee yard. I am out of equipment and was forced to use some junky frames, and I didn’t even have enough of them. While the two small swarms stayed in my hives, they immediately moved to the empty space that I had to leave. Once again, it is a very plain observation that bees make every time. They don’t care for the long straight combs.

But wait
Now that I have gone on and on, I need to write, “Wait, wait!” To open the old frameless hive styles that I have been pining for, would require extensive comb destruction to inspect for diseases, and to remove honey. I think that we had to be there to fully understand why the framed hive was an improvement over natural nest design.

Before antibiotics and framed hives, inspection for American foulbrood disease was nearly impossible. I suspect that the primary way to diagnose AFB in gums and box hives was to simply smell the odor of the disease. By the time a beekeeper could smell it, that colony was already dead. It had just not finished dying. I should quietly say that extensive use of antibiotics for general bee diseases also died (as it should have).

As emphasis shifted to other diseases – like mites, small hive beetles, pesticide kills – once again, removeable frames were indispensable. It could appear that straight removeable frames were a necessity to maintain a healthy bee herd.

I’m not a futurist either
Just as I am not a historian, neither am I a futurist. But I can envision a future electronic device that sniffs the hive bouquet and selects odor profiles and concentration of all kinds of things. For instance, AFB is an easy odor to discern. But other diseases and pests would have odor profiles. Possibly, once that technology is readily available, a natural nest type of bee hive could possibly reemerge. Hypothetically, the future beekeeper would know what issues were in the colony without having to open it. I don’t know. I’m daydreaming.

My opinion, and mine alone
Langstroth-designed hive is too heavy for one person to lift, is built around clumsy dimensions, tends to be top heavy when fully supered, requires wide blemish-free pine boards and without hive-top-rocks, the outer cover will blow off in a storm. But the removable framed hive design allows beekeepers to make splits, hive swarms, equalize colonies, monitor queen activities, share food stores and check for brood diseases. It’s not perfect for either beekeepers or bees but no one has been able to improve on the Reverend L.L. Langstroth’s concept. It continues to be genius.

Thank you.
Thank you for reading this far. If you had (or have) experience with simple hive designs, it would be nice to hear from you. I appreciate the time you took to read this piece.

Dr. James E. Tew
Emeritus Faculty, Entomology
The Ohio State University
tewbee2@gmail.com

Host, Honey Bee
Obscura Podcast
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