Stone Corner Farm

You come to a market table for honey and you want to know what sits inside the jars. Beekeeping, also called apiculture, is the maintenance of bee colonies, commonly in artificial beehives. Honey bees in the genus Apis are the most commonly kept species, while other honey-producing bees such as Melipona stingless bees are also kept.

Beekeepers keep bees to collect honey and other products of the hive. If you are shopping for a jar of honey, a cream or a candle, the facts behind the table help you ask better questions and choose with more care.

What does a beekeeper actually collect?

Honey is only part of the harvest you see on a table. Beekeepers collect beeswax, propolis, bee pollen, and royal jelly alongside honey. Income for beekeepers can also include pollination of crops, raising queens, and producing package bees for sale. When you pick up a beeswax cream, you hold one of several hive products, not a leftover from honey packing.

Where do you keep hives?

Beehives are kept in an apiary or bee yard. That yard can sit in the country or in a city. As beekeeping technology has advanced, beekeeping has become more accessible, and urban beekeeping was described as a growing trend as of 2016. Some studies have found bees kept in cities are healthier than those in rural settings because there are fewer pesticides and greater biodiversity in cities. If you taste honey from different yards, the flowers around each yard help explain why color and texture change.

How old is keeping bees?

People collected honey long before they kept bees. The earliest evidence of humans collecting honey comes from Spanish cave paintings dated to 6000 BCE, while evidence of beekeeping in Egypt dates to 3100 BCE. At least 10,000 years ago, humans began attempting to keep colonies of wild bees in artificial hives made from hollow logs, wooden boxes, pottery vessels, and woven straw baskets known as skeps. Depictions of humans collecting honey from wild bees date to 10,000 years ago. Beekeeping in pottery vessels began about 9,000 years ago in North Africa.

Why did potters matter to honey?

Clay pots tell part of the story you can still see in a jar. Traces of beeswax have been found in potsherds throughout the Middle East dating back to about 7000 BCE. In the Borjomi region of Georgia, archaeologists discovered honey dating back approximately 5,500 years, linked to ancient beekeeping traditions and ritual use in burial practices. Domestication of bees is shown in Egyptian art from around 4,500 years ago. Simple hives and smoke were used, and honey was stored in jars, some of which were found in the tombs of pharaohs such as Tutankhamun. For background on these early methods, read the history of beekeeping practices and follow how storage shaped taste.

What did Egypt show on temple walls?

Honeybees were kept in Egypt from antiquity. On the walls of the Sun Temple of Nyuserre Ini from the Fifth Dynasty before 2422 BCE, workers are depicted blowing smoke into hives as they remove honeycombs. Inscriptions detailing the production of honey are found on the tomb of Pabasa from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty around 650 BCE, in which cylindrical hives are depicted along with people pouring honey into jars. An inscription also records the introduction of honeybees into the land of Suhum in Mesopotamia, where they were previously unknown, with bees brought from the mountains and settled in orchards to collect honey and wax.

How large was an ancient bee yard?

Size is easier to picture at Tel Rehov. The oldest archaeological finds directly relating to beekeeping were discovered at Rehov, Israel, a Bronze and Iron Age site in the Jordan Valley. Thirty intact hives made of straw and unbaked clay were discovered in the ruins of the city, dating from about 900 BCE. The hives were found in orderly rows, stacked three high, in a layout that could have accommodated around 100 hives, held more than one million bees, and had a potential annual yield of 500 kilograms of honey and 70 kilograms of beeswax. In ancient Greece, in Crete and Mycenae, high-status apiculture is evidenced by finds of hives, smoking pots, honey extractors, and other beekeeping tools in Knossos.

What did Aristotle and Rome write down?

Aspects of the lives of bees and beekeeping are discussed at length by Aristotle. Beekeeping was also documented by the Roman writers Virgil, Gaius Julius Hyginus, Varro, and Columella. Beekeeping has been practiced in ancient China since antiquity, and a book written by Fan Li during the Spring and Autumn period contains sections describing beekeeping, stressing the importance of the quality of the wooden box used and its effects on the quality of the honey. The ancient Maya domesticated a species of stingless bee, which they used for several purposes, including making balche, a mead-like alcoholic drink. By 300 BCE they had achieved advanced stingless beekeeping practices, a variation still called meliponiculture.

When did harvest stop killing bees?

Before the movable-comb hive, harvesting honey frequently resulted in the destruction of the whole colony. The wild hive was broken into using smoke to quieten the bees. Honeycombs were pulled out and either eaten whole or crushed, along with the eggs, larvae, and honey they held. A sieve or basket was used to separate liquid honey from the demolished brood nest. In medieval times in northern Europe, honey and wax were still extracted after the colony was killed, usually with burning sulfur. It was impossible to replace old, dark-brown brood comb in which larval bees were constricted by layers of shed pupal skins.

How do movable frames help your jar?

In the 18th century, European understanding of colonies and bee biology allowed construction of the movable-comb hive so honey could be harvested without destroying the entire colony. Thomas Wildman fixed parallel wooden bars across the top of a straw hive 10 inches in diameter so that the bees attached their combs to seven bars, and he described multistory hives with successive straw hives below. Rev. John Thorley placed a hive in a bell jar screwed onto a wicker basket so bees moved freely and honey was stored in the jar. In the 19th century, Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth made practical use of the bee space, commonly given as between 6 and 9 mm, and designed wooden frames in a rectangular box that kept the correct space between frames. Bees built parallel combs without bonding them to walls, so a frame could slide out for inspection, honey could be extracted without destroying comb, and emptied combs could be returned for refilling. You can see the result in the Belgrade Lakes Sunday Market Guide and Season Calendar when summer honey arrives clear and brood-free.

How do you read a honey table with care?

Modern hives share the same logic across countries. They are square or rectangular, use movable wooden frames, and consist of a floor, brood box, honey super, crown board, and roof. Hives have traditionally been constructed from cedar, pine, or cypress wood, while hives made from injection-molded dense polystyrene have become more common in recent years. Queen excluders sit between the brood box and the honey supers to keep the queen from laying eggs in cells near honey intended for eating. Where mite pests are a problem, floors are often replaced with wire mesh and a removable tray. In 2015, the Flow Hive system was invented in Australia by Cedar Anderson and his father Stuart Anderson, with a design that allows honey extraction without a centrifuge. Pair that knowledge with the Central Maine Farms Dairy Creameries and Maple Houses to plan what you taste first, then ask the vendor how frames were lifted, how honey was separated from comb, and how wax was cleaned before it became a cream or candle.