Plain Talk: Box Hives (176)

Episode 176 – Plain Talk: Box Hives

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Jim: Hello, beekeepers. Jim here with my weekly wanderings on whatever subject comes to mind in beekeeping, but always in one way or another about something in beekeeping. I can't predict where these issues are going to be coming from. No doubt we'll be talking about a swarm that just moved into my colony here a few days ago, free bees. I always enjoy talking about that.

About three years ago, I began to interact with an individual. I'm not sure he was even a beekeeper who had an old beehive that he wanted to give to the little museum at Ohio State. Finally, that transfer occurred last March, and I want to talk to you about that hive for the next few minutes. Before we get into it, let me officially say that I'm Jim Tew, and I'm at  Honey Bee Obscura, where once a week, we talk about some aspect of beekeeping that we hope you will have an interest in.

Introduction: Welcome to  Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the  Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Listeners, I didn't know what the hive was going to be about. You see, our beekeeping industry has an incredible history that goes back, how far do you want to go? Human interaction with bees goes back for thousands of years. I've mentioned this before. The thing is, I'm not a historian, but as you grow older and older and older, and you hear your parents' stories about what it was like in World War II, and then your granddad tells you what it was like the first time he saw an airplane fly over his farm, as you age, history becomes more real. It becomes more relevant.

Maybe that's where I am in beekeeping right now. I have a tender spot for this hive. I didn't know what was coming from this donation, from this hive that we spent about three years trying to get. COVID got right in the donation and really screwed things up. It took a long time for it to be transferred, but it's now in my possession. I didn't realize that it was a box hive, a fairly simple box hive.

At first, maybe a smattering of disappointment. I had hoped for some classic A.J. King kind of hive or some of the special name hives that had come and gone, and here this was a remarkably simple old-style hive but it's a gift. It's very old. It has its story. I took it, didn't think much about it, got the thing home, and found it to be somewhat typical for these old hives.

One of the authors that I stumbled across in reviewing this colony as much as I could, this hive as much as I could, was that he thought the lumber should be almost one full inch thick, if not thicker. I made a quick calculation that he was recommending well over 150 to 170 years ago that the lumber that we made beehives from should be really about twice the thickness of our lumber today. The other thing that immediately happens, and I've already run dead headlong into this trying to rebuild colonies, is you can't find the lumber that they used to build these old hives. There are no more poplar planks, oak planks, that are 16 and 18 inches wide.

The first thing you do is you have to glue up the lumber. You have to put the lumber together. Literally, the first thing you have to do is to build the lumber before you can actually build the hive. That was not a surprise to come across this whole thing, that that hive had to be built that way. The fact that this hive even exists is a crazy fluke. The reason that it became special to me, and the reason I'm talking to you about it, is that there was some provenance with it. In 1853, a farmer either from West Virginia or Pennsylvania, I'm not sure which, built this box hive from plans that he got from a farm magazine.

That 1853 date is documented, and it's interesting because that's the same year that L.L. Langstroth published his book describing his removable framed hive. What I want to point out to you is that there's two worlds of beekeeping at that time. One was the very old traditional style of box hive beekeeping, and the other was this new and bright and exciting concept of hanging hive designed colonies. We could go off on a tangent on this because it wasn't just Langstroth. There were multiple other authors at the time who were really pushing their hive design. It was highly competitive, and at times these arguments became very vituperous.

They were argumentative because each of these men, they were usually men, was defending their concept, their life's energy that they had developed, and putting this hive design together, and then they had money involved in it. Oh, don't even get me going on the number of patents. There are tens of thousands of patents on every conceivable thing you could think of in beekeeping. I need to say again, we have a diverse, complicated, old history that most of us don't know anything about. There's no central source. There's no central site for beekeeping history. It's here, and it's there, and it's in that library, and it's in this university library. It's scattered all over. It's hard to put together.

These box hives would normally have been firewood because, you see, for many years we went through a process of transferring these hives from the traditional box hive to the modern hanging hive design of your choice. As we look back on this, we all think, well, that must have just been Langstroth. No, there was a lot of options that you could pursue. Langstroth ended up winning, but this and his hive was not the only one that may have been transferred to.

The fluke is this guy in 1853 in either Pennsylvania or West Virginia built a box hive himself from simple lumber. He used material of the day. I may mention again that he assembled this thing with square nails, and 171 years later, those square nails are all that is holding this box hive together. That's a testament to those old hand-cut nails and their holding ability. He put bees in this thing. [chuckles] Can you believe this? They died.

We like to think that our bees dying is a recent thing caused by varroa, caused by mites. Our bees have died as long as we have kept bees and artificial domiciles. His bees died. He must have been a thin-skinned guy, even though he was a farm fellow, because he just put the beehive and the related appliances in some shed somewhere, some barn, where they stayed, yay, all these years.

Isn't it ironic that if he had been successful and if that hive had flourished, that there is a great chance that he would ultimately have destroyed the hive and transferred it to a modern hanging frame hive-type design? I think this hive only survived because the early beekeeper in 1853 was not successful. We'll let you think about that while we take a break.

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Jim: This failure of a beekeeper guy who gave us 171 years later, a snapshot of beekeeping paraphernalia of the day, had one other report that was critical. He was a diarist. He kept a journal, so that's the reason we know where he got the plans. That's the reason we know that he was not successful. That's the reason we have a definitive date on this box hive.

I don't know what to say about that other than most people did not write. Let me think how to word this because this is not science. This is not fact. This is just me guessing based on my years of beekeeping. There's no books on box hive beekeeping. There may be some British books on skep beekeeping, but I don't know where they are. Beekeeping and gums, these things were always just fact sheets, just articles, just quickies.

They were not full-blown books with diagrams, charts, and fixtures on how to manage bees and gums and how to manage bees and box hives. It doesn't exist that I know of other than occasional pamphlets, and most of those pamphlets were how to get the bees out of these archival devices into "modern equipment." I suspect that the reasons boxed hives evolved at all was that usually farmers would pick up swarms and they didn't have gum to put them in.

We didn't use skeps in most of this country. There were some skeps in German parts of Pennsylvania, but across the country, we had abundant trees and timber, and so we used to always just build our hives rather than weave baskets. I'll bet you that this box hive concept evolved simply because there was not enough gums to put these swarms in because bees were swarming like crazy.

There was no effort not to let them swarm. Bees were totally natural. In 1853 Langstroth wrote his famous seminal book that we're still using a version of today, all these years later. Of course, it's been updated about 100 of times seemingly, and 1853 was the same time that this box hive was built. I think that the reason that this box hive thing overlapped hanging frame designs for so long, could I just guess? I have to guess because I don't know why.

Number one, it is brain-dead simple. You build a box about 30 inches tall. You may or may not attach it to this simple board bottom. You put an X brace across the center of it approximately just something to help hold the combs on hot days, and most of the time you wouldn't even attach the top because the bees would do that, and you want to get the top off because you're going to rip into it.

You don't have a smoker. You're going to have maybe a rag going, if somebody told you that bees didn't like smoke. You had no veil, you had no particular bee gloves, you were just tough. That should give you some idea of how much you wanted that honey all those years ago because there was pain involved in getting it. That was it. That was what was involved.

There was no effort to control swarming. There was no effort to find the queen. There was no effort to make splits and divides. You didn't have to because these units swarmed themselves to death and you just picked up the swarms. Listeners, could beekeeping have been any simpler? Then add this to it. Now you got to pay big money to get the patent rights to build this hanging frame colony, and you make beekeeping stunningly complicated with removable frames, with queens and concerns and supering and money investments.

All of a sudden it seems to me, and I shouldn't say all of a sudden, history has a way of compressing time, these people went from simple brain-dead beekeeping to complicated beekeeping, or importantly, listeners, they didn't make the change. They did what their grandparents did. They just put them in a box hive. People were putting bees in nail kegs when I started keeping bees.

My first years of keeping bees, it was very common for people who had nothing to put bees in nail kegs because that's what commercial-grade quality quantities of nails came in, was a small wooden keg, not a cardboard box like today. I think this was passed down and people just did what they always knew to do, and then part of it possibly was people just don't want them new-fangled hives.

I'm going to do it the way my dad did it and my granddaddy did it, and that's going to be it. There may have been some resistance to that. Here's the deal, those box hives hung around for maybe, I'm guessing 125 to 150 years after we developed the concept of hanging frame hives, and certainly after Langstroth hive finally became the pinnacle hive in our industry, and yet there's no books. I said that before. There's no writers, there's no supporters.

In the bee magazines, there was constant ongoing diatribe about these people who would not transfer bees, and one of their authors, I think his name may have been Gates, said that he didn't even try anymore. That it was just wasted energy to try to convince someone that they should be transferring these hives to modern frame equipment. There was discussion.

I think the box hive people probably knew it. Whether or not box hive people subscribe to bee magazines, I have no idea if that's a common attribute or not. The thing is, I bet you that the bees liked box hives better because those box hives that were probably more advanced than gums and a bit more advanced than skeps, the bees built their own nest in those box hives.

Whereas hanging frame hives, removable frame hives required the bees to build their homes and lay out their lives in the ways that we, the beekeeper wanted them laid out. Wouldn't it be interesting if someone could have surveyed the bees at the time and said, "Well, there goes the neighborhood because they were no longer allowed to build and lead their lives as they wanted to?"

There was even an article and it just really haunted me where a writer said that it was obvious it was an easy call that bees and box hives had a better wintering survival rate than bees in the new modern hanging hives. Because I've always been concerned about the way that our suspended frames broke up the natural winter clustering dynamics and made the winter cluster a petitioned cluster between the frames. Be that as it may, we know that some of our hive designs are not perfect, but we know those imperfections and we've learned to work around them.

There is that, but I'll bet you that the bees would've preferred the natural design that they could use inside box hives compared to the new equipment. The last gasp seems to have been that beekeepers as they evolved and their abilities and their capabilities for managing colonies, would still have a box hive here and there. Some of the old hives, you can buy them cheap from whomever, so these things were around as they died out, and the main purpose they seemed to serve according to what little spotty advance as I could find in the literature, was that they provided swarms.

Once those swarms issued, then the beekeeper would capture them and do what? Would put them in standard modern equipment. They wintered better. My last box hive transfer was in 1975. For me, that's when my box hive world ended. Most of you completely missed this. There's pamphlets, brochures, documents, all that kind of thing. You know how this box hive transfer process morphed? You know what the modern version of box hive transfers are? People who do cutouts.

Today's

box hive transfer person is nothing more than a beekeeping individual qualified to take bees out of the wall of a house, or something like that. They still exist, just not a normal form. Listeners, I'm winding down. This was not a flash in the pan. This box hive thing was the fundamentals of beekeeping for hundreds of years. Is not well documented because these people were not commonly writers, they were just people keeping bees for some honey and for some wax.

Yet we have the hives and our bee hives and our bee yards right now because of these early box hive gum skep type designs that innovative people re-modelled, refurbished, and redesigned into the beehives we have today. You don't have to go build one. In fact, I would suggest you not do that. They added a lot to our evolutionary history. Hey, thank you for listening. I hope you know I deeply appreciate it. I'm Jim telling you bye, and we'll chat again next week.

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