Bees & Beekeeping: Present & Past

The Diversity of Beehives in an 1882 Historic Bee Supply Catalog

With my historical apicultural work, sometimes I document the existence of old hives from supply catalogs, which is evidence they were actually sold and became a working part of our history, even if locally for a brief time.
Beehive patents are an important information source too. For me, they have a theoretical component, telling me what beekeepers want with hives, before the prototype hive may meet the bees for a test it may not pass. I have almost 1,000 beehive patents issued before 1900 (paper copies in a file). I know propolis would doom a large number of those ideas.
Even if a hive were only offered for sale for a few years, historic catalogs tell more of the hive designs actually offered to beekeepers. In that regard, catalogs had a more experimental component with the bees and beekeepers actually testing the hives.
One catalog showing a wider diversity of hive designs is the “1882 Sunny Side Apiary Circular and Price List.” The business was located at 259 Greenmount Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland. Charles H. Lakes was the manager. Figure 1 shows the catalog, featuring a hive on the cover called the “Old Reliable.”
In a time when liquid honey was generally suspected of being adulterated with cheaper sugars, the Old Reliable hive design was specialized for comb-honey production, an early 1880s version of it. Figure 2 reveals how Lakes uses the term “box.”
The gable (peaked) roof with deep sides covers two tiers of “Perfection Boxes.” These “boxes” originated as the old “honey box” from before the early 1850s when the removable frame, based on the bee space completely surrounding the frame, had not yet revolutionized apiculture. In a plank hive, also called a box hive, the bees built their comb fixed to the hive. Instead of killing the bees to harvest honey, some box hives …

 

---