Beehive

History

Although a variety of terms for beekeeping structures and containers exist in treatises and dictionaries, the terms beehive and bee house predominated in American discourse. Bee shed (in a 1768 deed) and apiary (in an 1831 article in the New England Farmer), however, were also occasionally used. Bee skeps, or beehives made of straw, wicker, or wood baskets, were listed in household inventories in German-settled areas of Pennsylvania, where ryestraw skeps continue to be made today.1 No American usage examples are known of Noah Webster’s term “bee garden,” which he borrowed in 1828 from Samuel Johnson (1755). The distinction between a beehive or skep and a bee houseis fairly clear: the former was a hollow vessel of natural or artificial construction for the habitation of bees, while the latter was a structure built by humans for containing bees in one or more hives.

Beehives and houses have been relatively scarce in the archaeological record and were rarely noted in artifact inventories of historic sites because they were composed of perishable materials and they utilized designs that were not earth-fast. Limited evidence of the construction, shape, and placement of beehives in America is provided by a few images of beekeeping containers [Figs. 1–3], as well as by several descriptions. Hives were often depicted as being conical in shape and resting on wooden frames or platforms [Fig. 4]. They appear to have employed coiled construction, and they likely were made of woven or braided straw. J. C. Loudon’s 1826 treatise describes several variants of this braided straw form [Fig. 5]. The construction of wood, bark, thatch, or brick bee houses on raised posts was, at least according to 1833 and 1835 articles in the New England Farmer and Loudon’s The Suburban Gardener, and Villa Companion (1838), an early nineteenth-century invention. However, citations such as a carpenter’s bill from Williamsburg, Va., in 1733 suggest a much longer tradition of this form in America.2 The moveable frame hive that enabled the large-scale commercial production of honey was not invented until 1860 by Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth. Other forms of hives, such as straw skeps, wooden boxes, and logs, generally required killing the bees and often destroying the hive when harvesting honey.

Beekeeping structures generally figured more prominently in husbandry texts rather than in garden treatises. The first American periodical devoted to bees was Bee Culture, begun in the 1870s, but before then beekeeping articles were published in agricultural journals such as The Genessee Farmer and The American Agriculturalist. One of the first American treatises on beekeeping was John Searle’s New and Improved Mode of Constructing Bee-Houses and Bee-Hives (1839). One of the most popular treatises devoted exclusively to beekeeping was Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee, A Bee-Keeper’s Manual (1853), which was published in numerous editions and translated into several languages.3

In spite of the scarcity of extant physical evidence, beehives and houses are significant to the history of American landscape design in several ways. First, because of the symbiotic relationship between bees’ honey production and their pollination of flowering plants and trees, beehives were often located in orchards or in or near gardens, as at Charles Willson Peale’s Belfield estate in Germantown, Pa. Second, like other utilitarian outbuildings located near dwellings on farms and plantations, beehouses were sometimes ornamented, as with the Gothic bee house described by Martha Trumbull Silliman at Monte Video in Connecticut. Third, bees were categorized in garden treatises and other literature as social creatures, and their presence in the garden connoted various symbolic meanings. The busy creatures’ “work ethic,” described by Jane Loudon (1845) as communicating “particular impressions of industry and usefulness,” was part of their appeal. John Cosens Ogden’s 1800 reference to bees’ “labors” and the repeated motif of hives in didactic art forms such as samplers suggested their association with industry and community. As Jane Loudon also pointed out, the bees’ hum and activity also brought a sense of animation to a garden. Finally, hives produced valuable resources. Fresh honey was used as a sweetener for making mead and as an agricultural commodity,4 and beeswax was used for candles and was also employed as a finish on furniture.5

--Elizabeth Kryder-Reid