History And Art Of Beekeeping

History
The benefits of honey have been known to mankind since the earliest civilizations, as is evident from beekeeping rock paintings that date back to around 13,000 BC. Beekeeping was highly advanced in Egypt and in Rome at that time. It wasn’t until the 19th century, however, that this form of honey production was made popular in America by Amos Root.

Beekeeping is also known as apiculture, a beekeeper is also called an apiarist, and an apiary is where the bees are kept. The basic purpose of beekeeping is to collect honey and beeswax, but it is also used to pollinate crops and generate bees to sell to other beekeepers.

Honeybees were imported from Europe by the colonists of America, Australia and New Zealand, as they were ideal for honey and for use as pollinators. The earliest imported species were the dark bees. Later, the Italian bees, carniolan bees and Caucasian bees were imported. In 1990, Russian honey bees (which are extremely resistant to bee parasites) were imported into the U.S.

Before the 1980s, beekeeping was mostly carried out in America by hobby beekeepers with age-old technology. However, with the arrival of dangerous parasites like the tracheal mites in the 1980s and the varroa mites and small hive mites in the 1990s, these traditional beekeepers found it difficult to prevent the bees from dying, as they did not have the techniques to tackle these parasites.

Local beekeepers of Asia use other species of Apis for honey and beeswax. In Australia and Central America, non-Apis species of honeybees, also known as stingless bees, are still being used.

Art of beekeeping
Beekeepers use a box, known as a hive, to house a colony of bees. A colony consists of a single queen bee, many infertile worker bees, and drones, the male bees. The hive also houses the brood, which consists of eggs, larvae and pupae.

During the spring and summer months when there is good weather and plenty of forage available, provisions such as nectar and pollen are amassed in the colony of bees to allow for reproduction and survival in the winter .

To achieve a maximum harvest, it is essential that the population of the colony is high – between 30,000 and 60,000, depending upon the amount of forage available. In the winter, this population is brought down to about 6,000 so that the consumption of provisions is minimized. The population cannot be reduced much more than this since the bees need to revive the colony in the spring. Moreover, an optimum temperature of 48 degrees Fahrenheit is required for the bees to survive through the winter, and for that a minimum number of bees need to be clustered together in the colony.