Langstroth, the Christmas Gift

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beekeeping

Excellent read!

Bad Beekeeping Blog

I’m repeating a blog which I posted on Christmas Day last year. It’s about the inventor of modern beekeeping, L.L. Langstroth. Enjoy!

Langstroth, 1810-1895

He invented modern beekeeping, making it easier, more productive, and less stressful for bees. However, Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth earned nothing from his invention and suffered severely from self-doubt, melancholy, and clinical depression. Yet, he changed beekeeping to its core and on his birthday anniversary (Christmas Day!) we give homage to the most important beekeeper America ever produced.

Langstroth was born December 25, 1810. That was some Christmas gift to the world, wasn’t it? His childhood seems to have been typical for a kid who spent a lot of time on his hands and knees on the streets of Philadelphia, trapping bugs and ants with table scraps. “I was once whipped because I had worn holes in my pants by too much kneeling on the gravel walkways…

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Royal Jelly – a story by Roald Dahl

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beekeeping, honey bee biology

This gallery contains 3 photos.

Originally posted on Adventuresinbeeland's Blog:
If you’ve ever read Roald Dahl’s short stories for adults, you’ll know they’re very different in tone…

“Imkers and Angels” – musings on a 1917 beekeeping documentary

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beekeeping

Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group

It is winter. I have recently found a silent-film about beekeeping, a documentary entitled Het Leven der Bijen or The Life of Bees. You can watch it here.

The film follows a simple and repetitive structure. First a juddering title-card describes some action, and then we see the scene. “The beekeeper guides us around the hives” is followed by a slow shot showing Jan Luberti walking through a garden lined with upright hives. Another title-card appears. Then we see his springtime inspection. The film follows the keeper and his bees though the events of a year, and finishes with a grinning toddler eating bread and honey, with the wholesome intertitle: “honey on the bread, makes the cheeks red”.

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Hurricane Coming!

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beekeeping

If you got ’em, use ’em! They don’t do any good sitting on the sidelines.

Before we start…

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beekeeping

I guess before we plunge into the content it might be best to say exactly what is planned.

The bees must make their own way in some form or the other. A paraphrase from a favorite movie of mine: “They have to pay something, don’t they?” Historically, not so very long ago, the bees paid their owner, if you can say you own bees. Honey bees as livestock could make the farmer a living at one time. Things have not gone well for the bees though and we are faced with difficult times. A sideliner beekeeper with a few dozen hives is faced with having too many expenses without enough income from the effort. And honey alone might be enough to pay the costs associated with maintaining and feeding the bees but is that the sum of the venture?

So the beekeeper, in my estimation, is faced with multiple challenges to both increase marketable products and reduce expenditures. Some ideas which come to mind are specialty products of raw, unfiltered honey, comb honey, wax, propolis, pollination services, queen sales, nucleus hive sales, and pollen. Cost cutting through sustainable methods by rearing queens in house, in house woodenware manufacturing, and making seasonable splits to maintain a steady supply of bees for use in multiple bee yards.

I hope to be able to speak to the many facets of sustainable beekeeping and the seasonal chores associated with maintaining healthy bees. I’d also like to be able to publish a seasonal calendar for use by others as a guide for their own beekeeping tasks.

And finally I’d like to somehow transmit to others the art of beekeeping as I have learned it thus far. It’s one thing to read the books and memorize the tasks, but learning to read and interpret the pulse of the colony by careful observation is more challenging. Utilizing all of the beekeeper’s senses to draw correct conclusions, assess, develop a plan, impliment, and evaluate the process based on observation and intuitive skills.

Lofty goals indeed.