The first photo here is of a modern beehive. Well, ‘modern’ is a relative term, and in this case it means that it is a design that has been around since the 1850s when the Reverend L. L. Langstroth noticed that when the space between two walls of a hive are further apart than about the width of a finger, bees will not ‘bridge’ the gap and build honeycomb between the walls.
So with the discovery of the ‘bee space’ as it is called, beekeepers could build hives in slats that could be removed with the honeycomb intact.
This was a great advance on the older ‘skep’ that you can see in the other photo. The problem with the skep (which had been around for several centuries) was that it had to be pulled apart in order to get to the honey. And that is bad for the bees (not surprisingly).
Bees In The USA
Did you know that the honeybees in the USA are imports? They were imported from Europe as long ago as when the very first Europeans landed in the New World.
And many fruit trees in the USA are also European imports. That’s why bees are so very important to their pollination – because the trees, being foreigners, have no natural pollinators.
Colony Collapse Disorder In Honeybees
The subject is important and I have added a page to this site that links to the page on qll.me where I have been collecting (and continue to collect) articles about CCD.
Take a look at the page here on this site and follow the link, or go direct to qll.me to read the whole thing directly.
I get Google alerts that ‘trip’ whenever there is a mention of colony collapse disorder on the web. And today I followed the alert to a blog named Think Yourself Real – well worth a look for what some people are doing in Peru to make a save habitat for honeybees.