Bees & Beekeeping: Present & Past
Difficult to Identify: Historical Section Comb Honey Equipment (Here us a Useful Technique)
Most old beekeeping equipment suggests a connection to bees, even by members of the public with a meager knowledge of apiculture.
Arguably, the most common case is the bee smoker. Even if a lay person calls it a “bee puffer,” the bee connection remains. Especially when some old bee artifact is sold on the internet, a bee connection is needed because buyers will be using search terms related to bees. Now for the difficult part.
What about the beekeeping equipment so specialized, so exotic, that when found, say originally from an estate sale, even a remote bee connection is not apparent (except possibly by association with other beekeeping equipment)? Once separated from other self-evident bee equipment (hives, a smoker, maybe an extractor and honey jars), by merely being tossed into another box of miscellaneous items, the weak connection with beekeeping becomes completely lost.
That identity loss has made it difficult to find certain specialized pieces of apicultural equipment. Most importantly, that includes a large component of America’s historical apiculture: the equipment needed to assemble the sections for section comb honey. Back in time when honey in the comb was the signature of its purity, consumers trusted it. Before the pure food laws in the 1880s, consumers did not trust liquid honey, what today we call extracted honey. Consumers assumed honey sold as a liquid was adulterated — like most other things, including beeswax. Adulteration increased the volume of honey with cheap sugars, but the
adulterated honey sold at the higher honey prices.
To gain the purity of honey in the comb, the assembly of the sections was labor intensive, first to fold the wooden section boxes and then to attach the foundation in them. (The work also included loading the sections in the supers, but there was no specific equipment for this job, at least that became a benefit to a sizeable number of beekeepers.)
J.S. Harbison, who famously took bees to California and rail-shipped back east huge honey crops, is credited with inventing section comb honey in 1857. His working sections, made from four wood pieces nailed together, held two pounds of honeycomb. (The modern one-piece section came later.) Several of these large sections were connected tightly together as a unit. The large sections, bound in a group of about 10, resembled a small rectangular box cut into cross sections, like slices of bread in a loaf. The honey in a box, some shaped like a shoe box, was reminiscent of earlier beekeeping when honey was sold in …
