Honey bees are essential to our health and wellbeing. Many plants that provide us with food would not reproduce without the assistance of bees, and honey bees are the only insect that produces food for humans. Today we will explore the history of beekeeping with some observations about the practice in this area.
Georgia ranks ninth among states in the production of honey with 3.3 million pounds annually. One of the best-known Georgia bee producers was J.J. Wilder (1872-1950) of Waycross, called the “Georgia Bee King,” whose 300 apiaries (place where beehives are kept) and 14,000 colonies extended 200 miles and housed a billion bees in the early 1930s, making it one of the world’s largest.
Bee cultivation history dates back to prehistoric times. Cave paintings in Spain have portrayed humans foraging honey from wild hives 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Honey played a vital role in ancient Egypt where it was used for food, cosmetics, medications and more. Even after organized beekeeping using woven straw hives or baked clay tubes or domes was developed around 2500 B.C., destruction of the hives during honey collection continued until the 1850s. That’s when Lorenzo Langstroth of Philadelphia invented the wooden Langstroth hive with removable frames to hold honeycombs. His box revolutionized beekeeping and continues to be the most popular design today. If kept under proper conditions, natural honey can last forever, which explains why honey found in dry Egyptian tombs is still edible.
Bee colonies are wondrous creations. Each contains between 60,000 and 100,000 bees consisting of three types: workers, drones and the queen. The bees work together to assure the health of the hive, each type with its defined role. The vast majority of bees in a colony are female worker bees who build the wax comb that holds eggs, feed the brood of new…
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