IMPORTANT DATES IN BEEKEEPING

• 2600 BC     Egypt:   Knew how to smoke bees using earthenware pipes and remove honeycomb.

• 340 BC     Aristotle s "Historia Animalum" discussed floral fidelity, winter feeding, the fact that bees assume different tasks at different stages of adult life, and mentions foulbrood disease.

• 25 BC     Virgil (Roman) told about placing hives out of the wind and away from livestock, and the importance of a clean water supply.

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• the sale of propolis for medicinal use.

• 60 AD     Comella (Roman) described beekeeping tools, including a smoker and a hive tool very much like the ones used today.

• 1400     Straw skeps introduced by Anglo Saxons, replacing fragile pottery hives.

• 1650's     Rev. William Mew of Gloucestshire, England, built an octagonal hive and supers from wood.

• 1675     John Gedde, a Scot, granted patent for a wooden hive with removable inside frames.

 

• 1792     F. Huber of Geneva, Swiss, with his faithful servant F. Burnens to do actual observations because Huber was blind, did the first truly scientific observations of honeybees. Huber discovered that bees can transform worker eggs into queens, that a queen, not a king, ruled the hive, that workers could lay eggs that would hatch, that queens will fight, that queens mated in flight, studied the causes of swarming, the use of antennae, and the production of wax scales. Huber also developed a "leaf" hive so that individual vertical combs could be examined.

• 1851     Rev. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth discovered the concept of bee space, realizing that honeybees will leave open a space of 5/16", building burr comb in spaces over 3/8" and propolizing spaces 1 /4" or less. Langstroth developed the 10 frame "deep" hive with moveable frames as used today. Langstroth' s discoveries enabled modern beekeeping to take place on an economical basis.

• 1857     Johannes Mehring, a German carpenter, developed wax foundations with octagonal indentations (5 per inch) for use in Langstroth' s frames. With this development straight combs could be assured.

• 1865     Abbe Collin built the first wire queen excluder.

• 1866     Major Franz von Hruschka of Austria developed the centrifugal honey extractor, designed for the 10" x 10" Austrian frames.

• 1868     A. J. Root designed a centrifugal honey extractor for Langstroth frames, and put gears from an apple parer on top, thereby giving geared leverage for ease of use. Root's extractor was the first all-metal extractor.

• 1870     Moses Quinby of New York State developed the first bellows-type smoker.

• 1891     E. C. Porter of Illinois developed the leaf-spring bee escape, still in use precisely as designed by Porter.

• 1896     E. B. Weed of New York State developed rollers for imprinting a continuous sheet of wax foundation of a uniform thickness. Previously, a wooden board was dipped into molten wax, the wax allowed to cool, then the sheet pulled away from the board.

 

• 1920's     Root and Dadant improve Hetherington's idea of wire reinforcing in the foundation. Weed's thin foundation would often fail in Root's and Dadant's extractors, and they were the principal sources for wax foundation in America.

• 1919      Karl von Frisch, of Germany, first published on beekeeping and the scientific analysis of bee behavior. von Frisch continued to study honeybees for 59 years, discovering bee language as expressed in the "bee dance," plus other discoveries which together were more than all other scientific discoveries in history combined. For his work von Frisch won the Nobel Prize in science in 1973.

 

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