Victorian beekeeping

[mightymads]

Just finished watching the Victorian Farm series. In episode 5 there is a section about how beekeeping was done back in the day.



The modern bee-hive was created in 1851 by an American called Lorenzo Langstroth. He based his design on an amazing observation that the bees always construct their combs with an 8 mm gap. This 8 mm gap became known as bee space, and replicating it was the basis of Langstroth's invention.



Once the combs are full of honey, the process of extraction is done as follows:

First, decapping (cutting off the wax cap from the comb);



Then there's honey extracting machine which works on the principle of centrifugal force.



The combs are placed inside, and the handle is rotated manually until all honey comes out.



And finally the honey can be poured into a jar:



It's just a gist of what was shown in the episode, and watching the process is much more interesting!

Comments

[rachelindeed]

Ha, it looks quite fun!

Also, I had no idea that was the basis of the title for sanguinity's retirement!lock WIP, "Langstroth on Bees"! A short story has already been posted, but I think the full work is going to be at least 30K+ once it's done. So much to look forward to! :)

[mightymads]

Thanks so much for the link! I loved the story and am looking forward to more!

[sanguinity]

Well-spotted! The title is a reference to scientific Mr Langstroth of the movable hive! Langstroth revolutionized beekeeping: before him, bees were largely kept in straw skeps or frameless wooden boxes. You couldn't inspect the health of the bees, you had far fewer options to manipulate or assist the hive, you couldn't keep honey cells and brood cells in separate parts of the hive, and you had to destroy the hive to harvest any honey. Mr Langstroth's hive reversed all of that, and Mr Holmes admires his work very much.

The draft is currently 40K (I've added a chapter or two since I wrote From Allegany), and there's probably another 20K in that story, easy. May it one day be finished!

Thank you for the plug! It was a pleasant surprise!

[mightymads]

I’m looking forward to your story whenever it’s ready! And yes, it was mentioned in Victorian Farm that prior to Langstroth’s invention bees were kept in basket-like hives and had to be killed during harvesting. As they said, Langstroth’s hive turned beekeepers into bee-managers. Such a humane innovation :)

[orchid314]

Fascinating. I didn't know that prior to that bees had to be killed in order to get at the honey.

I recently came across this article about TW Cowan, who apparently had a great influence on beekeeping in Britain and would have been a contemporary of Holmes's.

It says that he was the inventor of the cylindrical honey extractor. I'm assuming that's what is depicted in the illustration in your post?

[mightymads]

Thank you for the link! Yes, I suppose that’s the cylindrical honey extractor. They also showed its predecessor which was invented by Francesco de Hruschka.

[sanguinity]

It really was revolutionary! The whole thing about bee-space... It's not JUST that bees leave themselves 8mm gaps to move in, but that they'll fill in wider gaps until they're just 8mm, and close up narrower gaps completely. Which means that in a non-bee-space hive, the bees are constantly refitting the interior dimensions to suit themselves, welding things together with propolis (their main construction material), and making anyone else getting into the hive afterwards a destroy-everything-to-get-at-anything sort of affair.

WHEREAS! The Langstroth hive has everything set up exactly to the bees' preferred dimensions and comfort, so that the bees don't do any compulsive remodeling, as it were. The frames are spaced exactly so that the bees don't feel a need to "correct" their positioning, with the result that when a beekeeper opens the hive again, lo, the frames are as free and movable as they were when the beekeeper first put them in the hive!

And once it becomes possible to open a hive and dissassemble it into its component parts without doing any real damage, all kinds of things become possible. Queen excluders, to keep honeycomb and brood comb separate, so you can harvest honey without killing brood. Honey supers, which let you harvest honey multiple times in a season. Hive division, to prevent the stress and potential losses of swarming. Inspection for parasites, so that you can help the bees battle wax moths or what-have-you. Just! Whole new worlds of apiculture opened up with Langstroth's invention!

It really was just an amazing moment of insight: such a simple observation, with such huge implications!

[mightymads]

Sounds like an invention after Holmes’s heart—one little observation and so much improvement.

[sanguinity]

My thinking entirely. ;-)

[orchid314]

Did you grow up with bees or have you raised them before?

[sanguinity]

Neither. I'm just a nerd who's writing a 40K-and-counting fic about Mr Sherlock Holmes, beekeeper. This is all, um, background reading.

(Although in case anyone is worried, none of any of this is in the fic! I do understand about keeping the nerdly background reading away from the story proper unless its relevant to the story, or I need an authenticating detail to ground a scene.)

[sanguinity]

Yeah, I've had some bad encounters with wasp nests over the years (are there good encounters with wasp nests??), and I'm consequently jittery about wasps. I used to be jittery about bees, too, before coming to think of bees as an entirely different thing: bees are soft and fuzzy and have an amazing amount of chill.

But it took years to get there. Reading and cautiously observing and reading some more and getting a little bolder about the observing, until finally coming to believe deep down in my soul that bees really don't give a fuck as long as you're not messing around with their hive.

[mightymads]

This reminds me of a moment in the film Mr. Holmes, where the elderly Holmes explains to his young companion the difference between bees and wasps, and that wasps are bees’ enemies because wasps kill bees.

Spoiler

[sanguinity]

A moment which the young companion took too much to heart!

(Like I said, are there good encounters with wasp nests??)

[sanguinity]

I love the historical farm series!

Edwardian Farm (one of the sequels to Victorian Farm) gave me a ton of Holmes feelings, actually. It's set at the base of Dartmoor, so every once in a while there are exciting references to the Dartmoor ponies or some such (the series of course references Hound of the Baskervilles), and of course it was during the Edwardian period that Holmes turned to rural life. I doubt that he ran a commercial, money-making farm such as we see in Edwardian Farm, but we do get a strong sense of what Holmes' neighbors would have been up to, and with what technology, which is always useful for setting a scene. Plus there's an episode about holiday-making at the beach, and of course we know that Holmes enjoyed swimming in the Channel, and townspeople enjoyed making a visit to the seaside at Fulworth... There's quite a lot of Edwardian Farm that is Holmes-adjacent, in one way or another.

[mightymads]

Sounds absolutely great! Next in my to-watch list, then.

[orchid314]

Oh, I need to watch this. Thank you for the recommendation.

Holmes-adjacent–I love that word.

ETA: Sorry, I was juggling too many things at once. I meant to say that I can't wait to read your story.

[sanguinity]

While I'm plugging the Historical Farm series, I should also say that Ruth Goodman, one of the presenters/re-enactors of the series, wrote How to Be A Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life, which is full of the daily-life minutiae that is so handy when writing fic.

[sanguinity]

I have not read it, although we are in the middle of Tales of the Green Valley, the Tudor series that started it all, and I am SO HAPPY TO BE WARM AND DRY I CANNOT EVEN.

[sanguinity]

Half hour episodes are too short! They're all so young! Peter goes by FONZ. There's a cast of five. Peter FONZ and Alex are the comic-relief know-nothing buffoons of the group. I am ASTONISHED by the hassle and planning-ahead of oven-cooked anything. (I would never bake a pie, let alone bake everything into pies!!) HALF HOUR EPISODES ARE TOO SHORT.

Also, this is sooooooooo not my historical period, so everything is new and astonishing.

[orchid314]

I really need to check this book out from the library. Thank you for the rec.

[mightymads]

I really need to watch Edwardian Farm for retirementlock feels!

[mightymads]

Yes, it’s such a shame the recording was lost/destroyed. I tried to watch Victorian Pharmacy, but for some reason it wasn’t as captivating for me as the Farm.

[sanguinity]

And the lack of shenanigans with pigs!