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    How to Keep Bees Or; Bee Keeping in Rhode Island
    How to Keep Bees Or; Bee Keeping in Rhode Island
    How to Keep Bees Or; Bee Keeping in Rhode Island
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    How to Keep Bees Or; Bee Keeping in Rhode Island

    By Arthur C. Miller

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    About this ebook

    "How to Keep Bees" is a detailed and accessible guide to bee-keeping and apiary management, with information on starting out, constructing an apiary, acquiring bees, and much more. Written in simple, plain language and profusely illustrated, this comprehensive handbook constitutes a must-have for modern readers with practical interest in the subject. Contents include: "Introduction", "Pasturage", "Location of the Hives", "Hives", "Frames, Supers, Etc.", "Honey Boards", "Bee Escapes", "Drone and Queen Trap", "Smoker", "Foundation Fasteners", "Honey Extractor", "Hove Tools", "Comb Foundation", "Clothing", "Uniformity of Appliances", "Making a Start", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on Bee-keeping.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHome Farm Books
    Release dateSep 21, 2017
    ISBN9781473342507
    How to Keep Bees Or; Bee Keeping in Rhode Island

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      Book preview

      How to Keep Bees Or; Bee Keeping in Rhode Island - Arthur C. Miller

      State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

      STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE.

      JOHN J. DUNN, Secretary.

      Entomological Department.

      A. EDWARD STENE, Entomologist.

      Part of a Fifty Colony Apiary at Howard, R. I.—After Providence Journal.

      HOW TO KEEP BEES.

      ARTHUR C. MILLER.

      Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Bee Keeping

      Beekeeping (or apiculture, from Latin: apis ‘bee’) is quite simply, the maintenance of honey bee colonies. A beekeeper (or apiarist) keeps bees in order to collect their honey and other products that the hive produces (including beeswax, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly), to pollinate crops, or to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers. A location where bees are kept is called an apiary or ‘bee yard.’ Depictions of humans collecting honey from wild bees date to 15,000 years ago, and efforts to domesticate them are shown in Egyptian art 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.

      The beginnings of ‘bee domestication’ are uncertain, however early evidence points to the use of hives made of hollow logs, wooden boxes, pottery vessels and woven straw baskets. On the walls of the sun temple of Nyuserre Ini (an ancient Egyptian Pharo) from the Fifth Dynasty, 2422 BCE, workers are depicted blowing smoke into hives as they are removing honeycombs. Inscriptions detailing the production of honey have also been found on the tomb of Pabasa (an Egyptian nobleman) from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (c. 650 BCE), depicting pouring honey in jars and cylindrical hives. Amazingly though, archaeological finds relating to beekeeping have been discovered at Rehov, a Bronze and Iron Age archaeological site in the Jordan Valley, Israel. 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, three high, in a manner that could have accommodated around 100 hives, held more than 1 million bees and had a potential annual yield of 500 kilograms of honey and 70 kilograms of beeswax!

      It wasn't until the eighteenth century that European understanding of the colonies and biology of bees allowed the construction of the moveable comb hive so that honey could be harvested without destroying the entire colony. In this ‘Enlightenment’ period, natural philosophers undertook the scientific study of bee colonies and began to understand the complex and hidden world of bee biology. Preeminent among these scientific pioneers were Swammerdam, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Charles Bonnet and the Swiss scientist Francois Huber. Huber was the most prolific however, regarded as ‘the father of modern bee science’, and was the first man to prove by observation and experiment that queens are physically inseminated by drones outside the confines of hives, usually a great distance away. Huber built improved glass-walled observation hives and sectional hives that could be opened like the leaves of a book. This allowed inspecting individual wax combs and greatly improved direct observation of hive activity. Although he went blind before he was twenty, Huber employed a secretary, Francois Burnens, to make daily observations, conduct careful experiments, and keep accurate notes for more than twenty years.

      Early forms of honey collecting entailed the destruction of the entire colony when the honey was harvested. The wild hive was crudely broken into, using smoke to suppress the bees, the honeycombs were torn out and smashed up — along with the eggs, larvae and honey they contained. The liquid honey from the destroyed brood nest was strained through a sieve or basket. This was destructive and unhygienic, but for hunter-gatherer societies this did not matter, since the honey was generally consumed immediately and there were always more wild colonies to exploit. It took until the nineteenth century to revolutionise this aspect of beekeeping practice – when the American, Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth made practical use of Huber's earlier discovery that there was a specific spatial measurement between the wax combs, later called the bee space, which bees do not block with wax, but keep as a free passage. Having determined this bee space (between 5 and 8 mm, or 1/4 to 3/8"), Langstroth then designed a series of wooden frames within a rectangular hive box, carefully maintaining the correct space between successive frames, and found that the bees would build parallel honeycombs in the box without bonding them to each other or to the hive walls.

      Modern day beekeeping has remained relatively unchanged. In terms of keeping practice, the first line of protection and care – is always sound knowledge. Beekeepers are usually well versed in the relevant information; biology, behaviour, nutrition - and also wear protective clothing. Novice beekeepers commonly wear gloves and a hooded suit or hat and veil, but some experienced beekeepers elect not to use gloves because they inhibit delicate manipulations. The face and neck are the most important areas to protect (as a sting here will lead to much more pain and swelling than a sting elsewhere), so most beekeepers wear at least a veil. As an interesting note, protective clothing is generally white, and of a smooth material. This is because it provides the maximum differentiation from the colony's natural predators (bears, skunks, etc.), which tend to be dark-coloured and furry. Most beekeepers also use a ‘smoker’—a device designed to generate smoke from the incomplete combustion of various fuels. Smoke calms bees; it initiates a feeding response in anticipation of possible hive abandonment due to fire. Smoke also masks alarm pheromones released by guard bees or when bees are squashed in an inspection. The ensuing confusion creates an opportunity for the beekeeper to open the hive and work without triggering a defensive reaction.

      Such practices are generally associated with rural locations, and traditional farming endeavours. However, more recently, urban beekeeping has emerged; an attempt to revert to a less industrialized way of obtaining honey by utilizing small-scale colonies that pollinate urban gardens. Urban apiculture has undergone a renaissance in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and urban beekeeping is seen by many as a growing trend; it has recently been legalized in cities where it was previously banned. Paris, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Melbourne and Washington DC are among beekeeping cities. Some have found that ‘city bees’ are actually healthier than ‘rural bees’ because there are fewer pesticides and greater biodiversity. Urban bees may fail to find forage, however, and homeowners can use their landscapes to help feed local bee populations by planting flowers that provide nectar and pollen. As is evident from this short introduction, ‘Bee-Keeping’ is an incredibly ancient practice. We hope the current reader is inspired by this book to be more ‘bee aware’, whether that’s via planting appropriate flowers, keeping bees or merely appreciating! Enjoy.

      Contents

      Bee Keeping

      Preface

      How to Keep Bees

      Preface

      How to Keep Bees

      PREFACE.

      Bee keeping as a pastime or hobby is quite extensively practiced in this as well as in other States. Only occasionally, however, do we find persons who enter into it as their principal business, or even as a money-making side line.

      There is a good chance for an enlargement of this industry in Rhode Island. The market for good honey is not overstocked. In fact, we could with great advantage to ourselves supplant with honey some of the sweets now consumed, and it is safe to say that were the advantages of honey as a food well and generally known, and were the supply adequate, the number of bee keepers of both kinds, vocational as well as avocational, could be increased many times over without creating a surplus in the market.

      From an economic standpoint also bee keeping should be encouraged. Bees gather and store for human consumption a product which is otherwise wholly wasted, and while so doing they render valuable service to the plants by aiding cross fertilization in return for the nectar secured. In the case of fruit trees, this is of immense advantage

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