Plain Talk Beekeeping
One Hundred Years of Beekeeping Evolution
It’s our beekeeping time
Because it is a nice, round number, I arbitrarily selected 100 years of beekeeping evolution as my discussion time period. I sense that by doing this I unintentionally implied that we are now at some kind of beekeeping pinnacle. Yes, we are at a pinnacle, but pinnacles come and pinnacles go. One hundred years from now, some future self-assured beekeeping writer, somewhat like me, will look back at our present time and marvel at our naivete.
They will marvel that we actually had to individually drive our cars and we had to physically key in every word in this article. This future writer will probably wonder how we survived beekeeping with such a paucity of understanding of the function of viruses and other bee physiology and behaviors. I am neither a futurist nor a historian, but I do know that a century from now, things will not look the way they look today.
Can you believe this?
Can you believe that one hundred years ago we already had removable-frame hives (1851), comb foundation (1843), and centrifuge extractors (1865)? Essentially, beekeeping as we know it today already existed and had existed for more than fifty years.
And can you believe this? Beekeepers could not agree on what type of removable-frame hive to choose as the standard hive design — large brood-nest or small brood-nest hives. Everyone agreed that it was a good thing to be able to remove frames from hives, but what kind of hive? The Langstroth hive didn’t win the popularity battle overnight; it took years and considerable amounts of experience and implementation before the hive that we know today as the “modern hive,” rose to the top of the hive pile.
My era’s contributions
Essentially, much of what my beekeeping era and yours accomplished was tweaking what the previous generation did. We converted our processing equipment from lead-soldered tin to MIG-welded stainless steel. Then we further modified stainless steel into plastic processing equipment. Now some researchers have become concerned about the level of microplastics in our environment, in us, and in our bees. Should we worry about all the plastic components in our modern beekeeping industry?
We modified wax foundation into one-piece plastic frames that required no eyelets and no wiring. We discovered antibiotics for bee disease control and then we found that antibiotics were not always good for our bees, so we backed off on using them. We modified protective gear so that it is more efficient and more comfortable but the function is the same now as it was a hundred years ago. I usually must snicker when one refers to today’s beekeeping as “modern …
beekeeping.”
