Honey Bee History
With some PA flavor
Over the next few months I’ll be reposting the beekeeping column I recently concluded with the Boyertown Bulletin. It was a lot of fun to write about one of my favorite subjects for a local audience.
Honey Bees in Pennsylvania | BEE SPACE - January 2024
Once you learn to spot beehives, you’ll start to see them everywhere. Driving down country roads will reveal large honey bee operations sitting at the edges of crop fields to encourage pollination. You’ll glimpse small backyard apiaries as you walk suburban streets. And in cities, you’ll see the occasional rooftop hive atop an apartment building or on a fire escape.
European Honeybees, or apis mellifera, manage to wriggle into the everyday consciousness of Americans. Idioms like “busy bees” or “spelling bees” are thrown around easily. But it wasn’t always this way. For the first Americans, the Native Americans, honeybees weren’t part of life and culture at all. European honeybees, as the name suggests, are an introduced species for the Americas.
Native Americans found that the bees spread across the country just as readily as the humans. As Thomas Jefferson relates, “The bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers. The Indians therefore call them the white man's fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlements of the whites.”
As an invasive species, honeybees were able to spread quickly using a reproductive mechanism called “swarming.” When a colony of bees becomes too big, it splits into multiple swarms, each a large group of bees with its own queen. This usually happens in the April-June timeframe. Swarms try to find another home in a tree, or, as many Delaware Valley residents have experienced, in a chimney or under their vinyl siding. Native Americans watching the landscape, would begin to sight honeybees on flowers. They could anticipate that honeybees, with few natural predators in the Americas, could swarm faster than the colonists could march across the landscape. And thus the moniker, “the white man’s fly.”
The earliest record of honeybee introduction to Pennsylvania is around 1698 (Penn’s land grant happened in 1681, for reference). I suspect honeybee introduction could have easily happened sooner, as a colony of bees can be transported long distances under the right conditions. Colonists who wanted a sweet taste of home would have found that their bees had plenty of flowers to forage in the new land.
As Pennsylvania changed with the introduction of honeybees, Pennsylvania in turn changed beekeeping forever. A son of Philadelphia, Lorenzo Langstroth made a key discovery about how bees make their homes: spaces less than around 3/8ths of an inch get filled with propolis resin, a gummy substance bees use to “caulk” their hive; spaces larger than 3/8ths of an inch are filled in with beeswax comb. By creating individual frames with a 3/8th inch space around them, a beekeeper can manipulate a hive, extract honey, and treat an unhealthy hive without hurting bees. Prior to Langstroth hives, bees were kept in wicker baskets called skeps, and when honey harvest time came, the hives were often destroyed in the process. Langstroth made beekeeping a cooperative enterprise between bees and their keepers.
Today, the PA Department of Agriculture estimates that the industry is worth more than $76 million, while 6,000 registered beekeepers operate more than 60,000 hives across the state, plus the many more unregistered hives out there today.
Next month, we’ll talk about where to order bees, and what you can expect when they are delivered to you.
Will Caverly is the author of the beekeeping thriller Here, the Bees Sting and lives in Chester County with his family. Find more of his work at www.willcaverly.com. For more about the history of beekeeping in America, see “Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation,” by Tammy Horn.