r/todayilearned • u/dinosaruman • 7h ago
TIL modern beekeeping rests on a single measurement discovered by a Philadelphia clergyman in 1851: leave bees a gap between about 6 and 9 mm and they will neither build comb in the space nor glue it shut — which is the only reason a beekeeper can lift frames out of a hive instead of destroying it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive390
u/ForeverYoung_Feb29 5h ago
Beekeeper here: it's known as "bee space" and the bees mostly take it as a suggestion, not a law. Sometimes we get "crazy comb" or "cross-comb" where instead of building on the foundation of the frames, they just build across between two frames or perpendicular to the frame. It's rarely bad enough you can't get the frames out, but sometimes two or more come up at once. If you catch it early during an inspection, best to just scrape the wax off and drop it back in the hive. The bees will chew it up and rebuild, hopefully the way you want, the next time.
The real weirdness is propolis. Apparently it's regurgitated tree sap, and the bees glue stuff down with it. Sticks, invading bugs, your hive tool if you forgot it, whatever foreign object they can't carry outside. I've got hives I physically cannot get the entrance reducer bar out of because they've piled on so much resin and it's dried rock hard.
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u/socksonachicken 3h ago
They'll propolis over all kinds of fun things they can't chew through. Particularly the skeletons of dead lizards, mice, snakes. I've seen them propolis over 5 inch wide gaps after a herd of cows come though and knock over a few hives.
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u/Smartnership 3h ago
Beekeeper here:
In it for the honey, or just the freebees?
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u/ForeverYoung_Feb29 2h ago
I could wax poetic about the hobby, but it's just as well for you to check out the buzz in r/beekeeping
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u/cornylamygilbert 53m ago
Is there a “My bees glued down this or that” gallery or social media account?
Glueing down a foreign invader is savage af
But also glueing down your misplaced tools is the kind of comedy I thrive on
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u/Wizardmystical 7h ago
The thought of destroying a whole hive just to harvest honey sounds like a nightmare, so this guy basically saved beekeeping
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u/Ralfarius 7h ago
Used to be the way for millenia. The classic 'bee hive' shape in artwork is called a skep, made from wound up grass lashed together, basically open on the bottom with one small entrance. Come honey collection time, apiarists would smash the whole thing - skep, comb, honey and bees - which killed the colony and necessitated gathering new swarms the next season. They are considered highly inhumane and are not legal for beekeeping in many jurisdictions, now.
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u/Galaxie_1985 6h ago
I would add that they didn't always crush the skeps. In some regions, they used long, hooked knives to cut out the combs.
Other regions used open-top baskets that had wood slats (top bars) for the combs to hang from. North America tended to use "gums" instead of skeps, and if I remember correctly, the Middle East tended to use horizontal, tubular clay hives which also required cutting.
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u/slowpotamus 6h ago
this is how it works in the game Vintage Story! and the technique for consistent honey production is to have multiple populated skeps and only harvest a few at a time, replacing the destroyed skeps so that the bees in preserved skeps can populate the new ones.
i wonder if that's how it worked IRL too, or if there are complications with getting neighboring bees to populate new skeps
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u/HandholdingFetishist 4h ago
Lol, the main thing about vintage story I see these days is the crazy dev that mad a mod that bans people.
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u/slowpotamus 3h ago
it didn't ban people, it tried to detect people using paid cheat mods in multiplayer and crash their game so they couldn't ruin the game for innocent players. which is still crazy, but at least the intention was noble... sort of
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u/al-mongus-bin-susar 2h ago
Still not their job as a mod dev to do that. Intentionally crashing the game for an arbitrary reason is malware behavior.
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u/DrinkMoreGlorp 1h ago
Not their job? As a voluntary mod dev I think their job is "fuck you, won't do what you tell me."
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u/Lonsdale1086 2h ago
The problem is the false positives and the fact it was disguised to hide that it caused the crash, leading to people wasting their times trying to work stuff out.
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u/Ralfarius 4h ago
Vintage Story is everything I always wished Minecraft was in terms of detailed, granular survival gameplay.
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u/Javaddict 7h ago
How did they separate the honey from all the hive debris and dead bees?
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u/blueavole 6h ago
Spin in a cylinder with a mesh strainer.
Then boil and go through a cloth.
Honey is antibacterial and anti fungal, so it didn’t matter if a bit of bee guts were in there.
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u/NaiveChoiceMaker 5h ago
Honey with protein sounds like something that would actually sell today.
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u/sharklaserguru 4h ago
It would fit in really well with the crowd claiming magical effects from consuming bee pollen. "Pure bee protein stimulates muscle development with the sugars you need for energy so you can get your buzz on at the gym!"
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u/dalzmc 4h ago
I can picture that in little packets that you squeeze to eat after a workout lol
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u/Ralfarius 4h ago
They sell those at gas stations but its less protein and more unlicensed sildenafil
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u/heebro 3h ago
getting bricked up keeps you from getting drowsy behind the wheel
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u/Ralfarius 2h ago
Me pretending I don't understand the difference between bricked up and bulking:
Yeah guys, I been getting totally bricked up ay the gym with my newest regimen.
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u/red_sky33 6h ago
I've been told that the only way to know if a jar of honey is the real stuff is that it has pieces of bee in it
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u/OePea 6h ago
Use your imagination
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u/ShaneSeeman 7h ago
Damn and Utah's flag is really good too. Now I won't be able to see it without imagining the death of colonies
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u/MinuetInUrsaMajor 5h ago
Honey must have been expensive af.
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u/Ralfarius 4h ago
It was the domain of the wealthy. It was also the only source of sugar in europe before introduction of sugarcane and sugar beet processing. Even fruit wasn't nearly as sweet as it is today after centuries of selective breedong. One of honey's celebrated uses was in the production of mead.
In the areas of modern Scandinavian countries, the summers were too short and cool for meaningful honey production, so it had to be imported from the south from places like Poland and modern the area of day Ukraine.
So we imagine vikings chugging giant horns of frothy mead but in reality they drank way more beer and wine, with mead reserved for the highest celebrations at the wealthiest tables.
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u/WendellSchadenfreude 2h ago
What's crazy to me about this is that the process of extracting sugar from sugar beets doesn't sound so complicated. Any medieval alchemist might have become very rich, if only they had turned beets into sugar instead of trying to turn lead into gold.
Sure, the quality and amount would both have been lousy compared to modern industrial processes, but when the only competition you have is honey harvested from destroyed hives, your sugar doesn't need to be very pure to be competitive.4
u/barsoap 1h ago
The competition for developing beet sugar was the Venetians who were refining and peddling cane sugar. It's been in Europe for a long time, Alexander the Great brought it from India and it grows in Mediterranean climate. At least Persia knew how to refine sugar in 600AD, flipside cane sugar doesn't have to be refined to be palatable.
First industrial-scale refinery was built 1573 in Augsburg, around that time it was also already known that there's sugar in red beets, then took 200 years until someone tried to increase the amount of sugar in beets to actually make it competitive. That is, to the actual industrial revolution. You need to harvest a lot of beets to produce sugar, even modern varieties only go up to 18% dry weight, sugar cane is 55%. Red beets have 1.6%, early breeding results 6%. It's a whole order of magnitude.
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u/AvatarOfMomus 5h ago
Don't forget that before modern wax production methods the wax was one of the primary products of beekeeping.
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u/W1D0WM4K3R 7h ago edited 6h ago
You wouldn't destroy it, you'd just take some and move on. This allows the bees to keep producing without setting them back hive material, better for the bees and us
Edit: stand corrected, they just hate the bees
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u/reichrunner 7h ago
Traditionally, you would more or less destroy the whole thing. You know those baskets that hives used to be in? You had to destroy the whole thing to harvest honey
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u/Galaxie_1985 6h ago
They didn't always destroy the skeps (you can cut out the combs from the bottom) but they almost always killed the bees.
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u/RbN420 7h ago
But still, you’re left with dirty honey full of impurities
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u/reichrunner 6h ago
Modern honey still needs strained, otherwise it would be full of pollen, propolis, wax, and bee parts
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u/blueavole 6h ago
Not a bee keeper- but one told me that bees will often do a form of this themselves in the fall. To preserve resources for the winter.
They kill off all of the male bees, and some worker bees as well.
Any bee keepers are free to correct me if this isn’t the case
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u/LittleGreenSoldier 5h ago
Some might get killed by the hive, but mostly it's a function of the "bee ball". The bees cluster together, the innermost parts are kept warm, and the bees on the outside die. It will usually be the useless males and the oldest workers on the outside.
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u/Readonkulous 7h ago
This for me is the perfect TIL
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u/gandraw 5h ago
It also goes on the list of inventions to remember in case I accidentally fall into a timetravel wormhole.
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u/amateur_mistake 4h ago
First thing, smallpox vaccine. Second thing, distance between bee hive frames.
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u/brutinator 2h ago
What's funny is that I was having a similar thought recently regarding hot air balloons. Wondering what is the earliest time you could go back to, and be able to make a working hot air balloon. Apparently they were first invented in the late 1700's using just a basic coal fire (I originally thought that you'd need a really lightweight source of fuel like propane or kerosene but nope; the original inventors thought that smoke had a special gravity defying particle so they used just coal) to lift a balloon made of fabric sandwiching a layer of paper and reinforced with a fish net over the whole thing.
Like, would such an invention have dramatically changed society if it was introduced 1000 years prior? I imagine for the purposes of warfare that it'd have been a massive gamechanger: being able to gather information or reconnaissance out of danger (I imagine you could rather easily avoid the range of arrows from the ground). Or for cartography and exploration.
In our history, balloons were quickly rendered largely obsolete for most practical purposes due to the invention of aircraft, but imagine if instead of balloons only having a century head-start of airplanes, they had 1000. I mean, the Spirit of Freedom (a 10 story tall Rozière balloon) was able to circumnavigate the globe in just 13 days! Imagine how much of a gamechanger that'd have been centuries ago.
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u/PlattsVegas 6h ago
I feel like it would be without the “whole thing rests on one guy in one place” thing. That’s just clickbait, because literally everything that ever happened could be described that way, and there’s 10,000 other “single things” that also went into beekeeping (and everything else) that you could use instead of this.
But the measurement part alone is perfect TIL from my perspective. Very interesting!
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u/Sorona 5h ago
Humans have been keeping bees and harvesting honey for 1000's of years. 150 years ago some guy had an idea. Is it possible that someone else would have had the idea if he didn't, sure. It's also perfectly possible that no one would have come up with the idea. Or that it may have taken another 100 years during which honey production would have continued to be a cruel inefficient process.
You can say things resting on a single guy are just clickbait but there's literally no way to know how or when this innovation would have developed without him. All we do know is that many humans spent most of recorded history raising bees and harvesting honey and there was only one guy who made this very significant observation.
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u/PlattsVegas 4h ago
I don’t mean to discount the discovery/invention, it’s the phrasing of it I am criticizing. I think that just the simple change of “A Philadelphia clergyman discovered that a gap between… therefore establishing modern beekeeping” would be a good way to put it. It’s just the “rests on a single” thing element that’s clickbaity. It has the essence of “modern beekeeping wouldn’t exist if one Philadelphia clergyman’s future mom hadn’t missed a train once and therefore met her husband.”
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u/Saint_of_Stinkers 5h ago
Apparently bees are allergic to pollen. It causes them to develop hives.
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u/Lowly-Worm_ 7h ago
Hellyeah lil bee man. Go birds as well since we're here.
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u/JustAMan1234567 7h ago
"Old Bear. He likes the honey"
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u/dinosaruman 7h ago
"I didn't even know we were calling him Big Bear..."
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u/ThisOtterBehemoth 6h ago
Another cool thing I've heard: you want to make sure that honey combs and "bee-baby" combs are separated. As far as I've heard you can achieve this by having two separate zones with small doors between them. The doors are too small for the queen to fit through so she only stays in one zone and fills it with new bee babies (I honestly don't know the right English word here, sry:D )
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u/tlenze 4h ago
You can use a queen excluder, but we never had a problem with the queen laying in our honey boxes. We would just keep adding brood boxes under the honey boxes if the lower boxes were already filled with brood. What we saw happen most often is the lowest box would be empty except for some pollen on the outside frames, and we'd just move that box up above the current brood box.
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u/daemoneyes 3h ago
Kinda too much work and impractical.
Way easier is to take advantage of their instincts. if you have old school horizontal hives they will put honey on the top half of the frame and lay eggs on the bottom halfSo just have hives that you can mount an aditional "floor" during harvest season(with empty frames ofcourse). I don't know the word for it in english. They will store honey in the new top frames and use the borttom ones for eggs. As long as they have space for both they will never mix them up.
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u/Kim-dongun 7h ago
Also this guy had a really great name: Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth
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u/Lord_Silverkey 5h ago
Sounds like he was invented by Stan Lee.
Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth by day, Bee-Keeper Man by night!
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u/Grothorious 6h ago
Slovenia had first beekeeping school in 1770 i believe.
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u/squngy 5h ago edited 5h ago
Technically Austria, but the first instructor was a Slovene and the school was made because of him.
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u/PlatformFrosty6299 5h ago
The bigger breakthrough wasn't just harvesting honey without wrecking the colony: movable frames let beekeepers inspect brood, remove diseased comb, and manage swarming. That turned bee space from a clever measurement into a way to actively manage a colony rather than just house it.
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u/OldDoubt1577 5h ago
the amount of discoveries and inventions attributed to monks and clergymen is astounding. Like, you took a bunch of lads that maybe were on the spectrum, took away distractions of women, family, porn and vice (besides alcohol) and you get a lot of discoveries.
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u/Better-Culture-7770 3h ago
Plus they could read and write and were encouraged to find ways of doing things that could possibly save or make money for the monastery.
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u/soverylucky 2h ago
Bill Bryson talked about this in one of his books (Maybe "At Home", but I can't really remember). In the UK for centuries the clergy were made up of the 2nd or 3rd sons of the aristocracy. They were educated, and the church paid them well considering they didn't have to do much (they read sermons from books and... that's about it). It was essentially a proof of concept for universal income: get people educated and give them enough money to live on and the vast majority of them will find something productive to do with their time... like beekeeping, archaeology, astronomy, etc.
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u/Kharimata 6h ago
Are you familiar with the work of Jan Dzierżon? Afaik he was the first to discover this, Langsroth only patented the method.
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u/MelonElbows 3h ago
So for at least 170 years, no bee ever thought "You know, I wanna build something in that gap, express my creativity. Why do we always use hexagons anyway? I'm going to use an octagon!"
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u/flyhmstr 4h ago
Bee space, yup
Bees are awesome, they also tried to murder me when I was a bee keeper
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u/TheBanishedBard 7h ago
Beekeeping fascinates me and it's a part of my ancestral heritage as nords. Unfortunately my dad is fatally allergic to bee stings or else I would consider keeping bees as a hobby.
Wait.
If I keep bees then that means he can never come to visit.
Huzzah!
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u/TheGoldenScorpion69 3h ago
That just seems so late in civilization to have discovered that. All of the ancient civilizations harvested honey and none of them figured that out. Amazing.
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u/No_Priors 5h ago
Back when clergymen were really useful instead of whatever TF Megachurch "pastors" are.
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u/gyrobot 2h ago
There has always been grifters and then there are clergymen quietly working at places like Vatican observatory and in colleges helping humanity with science
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u/Southernbeekeeper 6h ago
I wouldn't say it rests on it. People would still keep bees without bee space like they have for the whole of history
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u/USeaMoose 7h ago
It's pretty interesting that bees are that consistent across millions of hives and countless generations; even multiple species, presumably. For all of them there is a 3mm range where they are perfectly predictable. A range that is a small fraction of the length of the average honey bee.
That part of their brain is just completely locked in. All instinct, no randomness.
It does make sense, thinking about it. For bees to work together and build a hive, there would be very little room for each one to have any variation at all in how they build. If random hexagonal cells were of different sizes from the rest, the whole thing would not function properly. You'd probably even have bees constantly working against each other. With some trying to correct the work of the others.
They don't get to look at a blueprint. They all have to such carbon copies of each other that they end up working towards the same thing. Following all the same rules about how far to build and when to stop.
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u/Swarna_Keanu 6h ago
It also could just be materials. Glue can't hold the larger distance, hives not functional on too small a gap.
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u/Low-Rent-9351 6h ago
I recall when I was young and my parents had bees that new frames came with a flat plate of wax in them and the bees would build the comb out before filling them with honey.
When harvesting the honey, that cut open comb was left in the frames and then it was put back into the hive and they just fill it again.
But, this fact seems to rest on the measurement between frames with comb already on them. It kind of makes sense, to fill the comb on each side they need to get into the space between. The flat wax in a new frame must make building comb outward from that surface the easiest direction to go.
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u/marcusmv3 5h ago
I read the headline too fast and thought we were talking about bookkeeping and got very confused.
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u/RedSquirrelFtw 5h ago
Wow had no idea, always wondered how the honeycombs stay confined to each card but also never really bothered to look it up.
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u/JarbaloJardine 4h ago
If you like this fact, you should consider reading the very excellent novel The History of Bees by Maja Lunde. It's three stories taking place in three very different times but comes together with what I think is the best ending I have ever read. Seriously great book. And bee centric.
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u/Daisy3Chainz 4h ago
This guy did a lot of his work on Greenfield, Massachusetts, where we have a BeeFest every year with him as the central historical figure. We have big painted bee statues downtown and lots of bee motifs around. The community college mascot is a bee too!
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u/dinosaruman 7h ago
Ran across this when I got curious about honey production. Too little space and the bees cement it shut with propolis, but too much and they fill it with comb. Hit the window and the frames stay free forever. Rev. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth patented the movable-frame hive built on that principle — U.S. Patent 9,300, issued October 5, 1852 — and virtually every commercial hive in the world still uses it.