The history of American apiculture has left a long list of bee supply companies that once were part of the growing honey industry. In the 1860s, these businesses began appearing, and they became more numerous in later decades. Some of the smaller suppliers may only be known from the literature from their catalogs and pamphlets.
A supplier high on my hunting list for most anything they made has been the W.T. Falconer Manufacturing Company of Jamestown, New York. Figure 1 shows their 1888 catalog cover. The banner, like a newspaper headline, told beekeepers over a century ago that the modern must-have bee equipment was the Simplicity hive and one-piece sections. Both designs survive today. In the 1880s, they were new.
The Simplicity hive was originally called the Langstroth hive because the frame dimensions were close to the size Reverend L.L. Langstroth had used, as the inventor in 1851 of the movable frame based on the bee space. By the late 1880s, beekeepers used several different-sized hives with frames of varying dimensions, which complicated matters when ordering hive equipment (see Figures 2 and 3).
For example, when ordering a honey extractor, the beekeeper had to give the correct-size frame. The bee supplier either had an extractor for that frame size in stock or built an extractor to fit the frames. Eventually A.I. Root introduced ordering extractors by numbers that corresponded to the different, more common, frame sizes. The number, painted on the front of the extractor, told the frame size it took, or a size range. Other manufacturers adopted Root’s numbering, including the Falconer Company. I have not been able to find a Falconer extractor, but in the Root extractor collection are two …
Figure 2
Figure 3
