In the 3rd century AD, Zhang Hua's "Natural History" in the Western Jin Dynasty stated that "there are bees in a distant mountain, and there are beekeepers there. In this method, wood is used as a utensil, or ten or five kinds of hooves, and small holes are made for bees to enter and leave, and the bees are spread all over the place with a beeswax applicator. In front of the eaves or under the court, this kind of bees will nest in spring and month. Among them, "wood" is the hive at that time, and "small hole" is the door of the nest.
From 420 to 479 AD, in the Yongjia Story compiled by Zheng Jizhi of the Southern Dynasties, there was a story that "in July and August, a group of bees flew first and found a berth, and everyone knew it was in a wooden bucket." Coat the bucket with honey. The pilot smells honey or stops. But in recent three or four years, it has been recorded that "wooden barrels" are beehives, which are coated with honey to lure bees to keep bees. From 779 to 843 AD, Jia Dao recorded in the Honey Department of Volume 302 of Ancient and Modern Books and Foodstuffs that there was a record of beekeeping with stones instead of buying honey. "Beekeeping with stones" showed that people still used stone beehives to keep bees at that time.
In A.D. 1030 ~ 1 100, Su Shi's poem "Picking Bees" in the Northern Song Dynasty said: "Flying bees are like wheels, among which there are royal bees. There is no place to divide the room and reduce the mouth. The former generation shami delayed the guests' stay, and the later generation urged them to drive away. The cloth bag is like a city and ends in a bamboo house. Small windows go in and out of Xuanzhi Road, and flowers bloom in summer at the head of the secluded garden ... ""wormwood "is a kind of wormwood, and its smoke can drive away bees after it is lit; The "cloth bag" is a bag used to hold the caught bees; Bamboo house is a honeycomb made of bamboo strips or poles; "Small window" is the door of the hive.
In A.D. 13 13, Wang Zhen of the Yuan Dynasty described the situation of collecting and distributing bees: "Hang bees with a pole, call them with a hat, sprinkle water on three sides to reduce dust, prevent them from escaping from people's hats, collect them, and gradually rest. Put the hat in the hanging place of a cloth bag and move it to a bucket at night." The "hat" was the bee-collecting cage at that time; The "barrel" was the honeycomb at that time.
From 1350 to 1365, Liu Ji's Li Yuling Zhang Qiuren described a professional beehive as follows: "There are thatched cottages in the garden, and the thatched cottages are guarded. Cuomu thinks that the palace of bees, its arrangement, density and lines are old and new, high and low, and high and low, live according to it, and adjust it to be noisy and cold, so as to fear its structure, such as its hair growth, fragrance folding and few people mourning it, which is called the original bee rope leopard, and there is no sun in summer. " Cutting grass and trees is the palace of bees "shows that beekeeping was carried out by hollowing out tree segments at that time."
These beekeeping conditions can not only be verified in historical materials, but also occasionally seen in some remote mountainous areas in China. For example, in the mountainous area of Jiangle County, Fujian Province, Chinese bees are often raised with inverted cone-shaped wooden barrel honeycombs, while in the mountainous area of Minhou County, Fujian Province, we can also see the scene of raising Chinese bees with box honeycombs.
Until the end of 19, China was still using this simple earth nest for beekeeping, destroying the nest to get honey. After the 20th century, Zhang Pinnan of Minhou County, Fujian Province brought back four groups of Italian bees from Japan in 19 12, and introduced live beehives to China. Since then, great changes have taken place in China's beehives, from using earth nests to using live beehives. Many beekeepers directly use Lance beehives to raise China bees. Later, many beekeepers began to develop live beehives suitable for raising Chinese bees, and some regional Chinese bee hives appeared, which promoted the development of beekeeping production in China.
1932, Hebei Wang trial-produced the Chinese beehive, with the size of 462×270×336 mm (length× width× height). There are 15 nest frames, and the inner circumference of the nest frame is 234×307 (width× height) mm; The bottom plate of the box body is a movable bottom plate. This kind of beehive is popular in the southern and northern plains of Hebei Province, and it is the predecessor of the tall Chinese beehive.
During the period of Zhangzai 1932 ~ 1934, Guangdong Province, an advanced Chinese bee hive was developed, which was slightly smaller than Lang's ten-cell hive and had an inner circumference of 498×336×244 (length× width× height) mm; There are 10 nest frames, and the inner circumference of the nest frame is 478×234 (width× height) mm; The bottom plate of the box body is a movable bottom plate.
1940, Jing Rong-style Chinese beehive was developed by Xie Jingrong, Anhui Province. Its structure is the same as that of the advanced Chinese beehive, and its internal size is 400×357×232 (length× width× height) mm; Nest frame 10, the inner circumference of the nest frame is 362×206 mm (width× height), and the hive is designed with a relay box. In order to shorten the distance between the nest and spleen of the upper and lower boxes, the upper bee path is not used in the hive. Although Jing Rong's beehives for Chinese bees have not been popularized, his idea of keeping Chinese bees in beehives conforms to the requirements of modern beekeeping and cannot be ignored.
Since then, chemical Chinese beehives, tall Chinese beehives, cage Chinese beehives, Chinese beehives and Yuanling Chinese beehives have appeared, and these regional Chinese beehives are still in use today.
In the 1970s, a framed Chinese beehive appeared, and 1 small nests were designed on the top of the beehive frame. The original nest frame is used by bees to give birth and reproduce, and the nest frame is used by bees to store honey. When taking honey, the honey in the nest frame is collected.
Since 1980s, the development of beehives in China has made great progress. Several superimposed beehives appeared, which laid a good foundation for tapping the production potential of Chinese bees, producing high-quality products such as honey and royal jelly, and realizing the mechanization of Chinese bee production. These beehives are:
198 1 The ten-cell beehive for Chinese bees developed by Yang et al., Institute of Bees, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences was designated as the standard beehive for keeping Chinese bees by China Bureau of Standards on 1983. The ten beehives of Chinese bees can raise two groups in one box, two groups in one box, and use shallow boxes for honey collection. At present, this kind of beehive is being popularized and applied.
In 199 1, a FWF-type Chinese bee nest was developed by the Department of Apidae, Fujian Agricultural University. The inner circumference of the bottom box of this beehive is 336×400×235 (length× width× height) mm, and the inner circumference of the auxiliary box is 336×400×2 10 (length× width× height) mm; Each box can hold 12 nest frames, and the inner perimeter of the nest frames is 300× 175 mm (width× height). Bees in beehives can be divided into two groups to feed, collect honey and produce pulp in the same box.
1992, Gong Fuqiang of Sichuan Agricultural University made a GN Chinese beehive. The inner perimeter of the bottom hive is 330×400 × 182 mm (length× width× height), and the inner perimeter of the secondary hive is 330×400× 157 (length× there are 10 nest frames, and the inner dimensions of the nest frames are 290×/kloc. Bees in the hive can eat, collect honey and produce pulp in the hive. Geological evidence shows that bees existed for millions of years before humans appeared on the earth and began to hunt hives. In primitive times, before human beings started beekeeping, wild bees lived in dark dead trunks or dry caves and earth caves. In areas with mild climate and few enemies, some bees even nest and breed in the open air under bushes or tree trunks. In the Middle Stone Age, because primitive people could not cut off and hollow out tree segments, they began to use natural tree holes or caves to keep bees. This happened in Africa, tropical Asia and medieval northern Europe. In the Neolithic Age, human beings settled in agriculture. Before the hollow trunk with beehives could be cut off by labor tools, the earliest beehives of domestic bees were made of bark rolled into a tube with both ends covered, but there were bark beehives for bees to enter and leave. Today, some beekeepers in Central Africa still use this bark beehive to paint honey or beeswax on trees to attract wild bees. When it is full of honey, they use fireworks to drive away bees to collect beeswax. In the Bronze Age, with the development of society, human beings had metal tools, and hollow trunks filled with wild bees appeared, turning wild bees into domestic ones. Later, it was developed to hollow out the trunk of oak, poplar and cork to make beehives. The size of the hive varies from tree segment to tree segment. When standing upright, use slate or wooden board as the top cover, and there are small holes at the bottom or middle of the tree segment as the nest door. When placed horizontally, both ends are covered with wooden boards or bamboo mats, and the nest door is opened in the middle or end of the tree segment. At present, it is still used in some underdeveloped areas such as East Africa, north-central Europe, Arabia, Afghanistan, Spain, Turkey, south-central Britain, the former Soviet Union, China and Yunnan.
In ancient times, in areas lacking forests, a considerable number of areas, especially the Mediterranean and Aegean coastal areas, used mud to burn mud nests for beekeeping. For example, the clay honeycomb found in Crete, Greece, was the product of Minoan civilization in 3400 BC. It is the earliest soil nest found in the world so far, and there are three kinds: the first kind of mud honeycomb is conical, with a length of 670mm, a front end diameter of 250mm and a rear end diameter of 220mm, both ends are covered with pine boards and sealed with mud, and the nest door is located at a distance of 100mm from the rear end. When in use, it is horizontally discharged on the stone wall with a height of 500 ~ 700 mm under the slope. The second kind of mud honeycomb is vertical inverted cone, with an upper mouth diameter of 350mm, a lower mouth diameter of 220mm and a height of 390mm；; ; The upper mouth of the honeycomb is increased to 400mm along the outer diameter, and 10 wood strips with a length of about 450mm and a width of about 35mm are used as the upper beam of the nest spleen; There is an 80×6mm door at the lower mouth of the honeycomb. The third kind of mud beehive is called "Walaski" locally, which means that ancient Greek beekeepers used movable beehives in vertical beehives. This hive can hold 10 nests and spleen; The upper 2/3 of the hive is upright, and the lower 1/3 is inclined outward as a passage for bees to enter the hive; The top of the hive is covered with a cover plate woven with leaves or baked with soil to resist wind and rain; There is a buckle 300mm away from the upper mouth on both sides of the honeycomb. When in use, it is placed in rows at the foot of a mountain sheltered from the wind in the southeast. In Egypt, it was found that the stone reliefs in the Temple of the Sun built in 2400 BC and the murals in the tomb of Rekh-mi-re of the 80th dynasty in BC 1450 depict honeycomb-like pictures with doors facing outdoor and stacked together. In cavalli, Attica, a large number of cylindrical mud honeycombs were found from 450 to 400 BC. This kind of beehive has a diameter of 320 ~ 400 mm, a height of 400 ~ 500 mm, a wide bottom, and a collar with the same diameter but a height of 65 ~ 90 mm (similar to the trunk of a live-frame beehive). The lid of the hive is flat and round, with several small holes for bees to enter and leave, ropes, branches and so on. It connects the cover, collar and barrel into a whole. When in use, hundreds of them are stacked together with the nest door facing outwards.
Three thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks began to use wicker honeycomb. This honeycomb is inverted cone, with an upper diameter of 380mm, a lower diameter of 300mm and a height of 580 mm. The inside and outside are coated with a mixture of soil and cow dung, and the bottom is covered with soil. There are 9 bamboo strips or wooden strips with a width of 38mm in the nest as the upper beam of the bee nest and spleen; The top of the hive is covered with wooden boards, and then covered with straw to protect the sun and rain. 1590, Rucellai G of Italy mentioned this kind of hive in his works. 1600, this kind of wickerwork honeycomb has begun to take shape. This kind of wickerwork honeycomb was discovered by Wheeler of Britain at 1679 in the mountain area of Hemetus, Greece, and Roca at 1790 in Archie Paragot, Greece. At present, it is still used in mountainous areas of Mediterranean countries such as Lebanon, Italy, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Spain and Portugal. Thousands of years ago, bamboo honeycomb was used in many fields. Thousands of years ago, Egyptians used bamboo honeycomb coated with a mixture of river mud and cow dung. In addition, tubular bamboo honeycomb coated with river mud and cow dung is also used in Caucasus, Turkey and Herefordshire, England. This kind of honeycomb is generally used at the ground level.
After wicker and bamboo honeycomb, straw honeycomb made of wheat straw and straw appeared. This kind of honeycomb is widely used in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain, and also in some places in France and the United States. Dome-shaped straw honeycombs woven with straw ropes appeared in Germany at the beginning of the first century. /kloc-At the end of 0/8th century, straw honeycomb was very popular in Britain, with superb skills and various forms. Thick-walled overlapping straw honeycombs similar to contemporary overlapping beehives appeared, and some even inverted a glass container on the straw honeycombs to produce honeycomb honey. 1865 Gravanhorst, Germany, compiled a basket-type straw honeycomb with a movable nest frame, which can freely check the bees and get honey.
In addition, in ancient times, there were also some areas that cut stones and made holes for beekeeping. For example, in Hungary, in the 9th ~14th century BC, a group of Balkan primitive people living in Szomolya, Hungary dug 90 stone caves with a height of 600mm, a width of 300 mm and a depth of 250mm on a hill as beehives to feed and catch wild bees. 1960, the Hungarian government has listed these grotto honeycombs in the national key cultural relics protection list.
In the 7th century BC, beehives made of wooden boards appeared. The works of Herodotus, a Greek historian in the 5th century BC, can prove this point. It is recorded that in the 7th century BC, the emperor Kypselos of Corinth in southern Greece took refuge in a wooden honeycomb made of cedar when his relatives rebelled when he was young. The early wooden cases were called "box beehives", which usually consisted of a wooden case 300 ~ 380 mm square and 460 ~ 600 mm high. There is no nest frame inside and the top can't be opened. The bee's nest spleen is directly attached to the top plate in the box, and some horizontally insert 2 ~ 3 pieces of wood in the middle of the box for bees to attach to the nest spleen. In essence, box-type beehives are just a disguised form of tree-node beehives, and the internal situation of beehives cannot be observed. Before14th century, this kind of beehive mostly appeared in the form of single layer, and then it gradually tended to be stacked box-type beehives with relay boxes. When collecting honey with stacked box-type beehives, cut a thin thread at the joint of the upper and lower boxes, cut off the nest spleen connected between them, then take out the relay box with honey in the upper layer, and add an empty box in the original position to let bees continue to nest and store honey. In A.D. 1634, in his works, Butles once talked about a box-type beehive with four boxes stacked upward.
In A.D. 1649, MeweW, England, made an octagonal beehive, which could be folded with tree trunks. The side wall of the beehive was embedded with glass for easy observation. 1655, Wren C in Britain also designed an octagonal honeycomb similar to that designed by Mewe W. The box has three floors above and below, and there is a round hole at the top of each floor. The two side walls of the box are also designed with glass windows. 1675, Geddes improved this three-layer octagonal beehive with a height of 305mm and a side length of 228mm；; ; There is a 100mm square valve in the center of the top plate of each box for bees to communicate up and down, and the side wall of the box is designed with glass windows for easy observation; There are six small holes at the bottom of the hive as the nest door; Each box has a cubic frame for bees to nest. Geddes's octagonal beehive contains the concept of trunk and the initial embryo of nest frame, but it can only be used indoors because it is made of thin plate. 18 19, the British Kerr improved the octagonal beehive. He made beehives with thick wooden boards, so that they could be used outdoors, and replaced the frame with cross bars, and stuck a small piece of nest spleen on the ventral surface of the slats as the initial working strip to induce bees to build spleen, and separated the bee lanes with glass rods between the cross bars. It is also equipped with an adjustable nest door. This kind of beehive has different lengths of nests and spleen, which can't be mobilized and is inconvenient to use. Since then, octagonal beehives have been gradually improved by adding nest frames, and were replaced by live-framed beehives in the19th century.
Around 1690, French beekeepers also began to develop square beehives with overlapping boxes. 1750, Palteau described beehives in his published works, and there were small holes on the top of each box for bees to get on and off the box. 1756, white people in Britain designed a beehive with boxes on both sides to expand the beehive for bees to store honey. White's beehive embodies the principle of modern horizontal beehive. From 1822 to 1832, Nutt T in Britain improved White's beehive and advocated its use. Natt's beehive is divided into three parts: an insect breeding box in the middle and honey storage boxes on both sides. When the bees in the insect breeding box are crowded, they can develop to the boxes on both sides through the small holes in the wall between the two boxes, which are similar to partitions. There is a glass container above the insect breeding box, where bees can build spleen and store honey. When the honey flow is over, the glass container and honey storage box filled with honey are taken out to obtain honey. In addition, drawer feeders are designed at the lower parts of the three boxes. Natt's beehive was still used by some beekeepers in Britain in 1868. Since Langer invented the living-frame beehive in the middle of19th century, this kind of horizontally spread beehive has made great progress: at the end of19th century, American beekeeper Poppleton O O O made a long beehive, which can hold 30 ~ 50 nests, and the nests are arranged horizontally, with the door at the front of the beehive. At the beginning of the 20th century, Haruhiro Aojiro, a Japanese beekeeper, strongly advocated the adoption of horizontal beehives with laterally expanded beehives. 5 ~ 10 bee colonies are collectively raised in a beehive, and each bee colony has 14 nests and spleens, of which 6 are used for raising insects and 8 are used for storing honey, and the breeding area and the honey storage area are separated by a frame partition. In the middle of the 20th century, Arab beekeepers made three beehives with bottom plates according to the principle that Nutt T beehives spread out horizontally. The dimensions of each beehive were 250×250×370mm (length× width× height), and there was a nest door. The positions of the beehives could be exchanged. At present, a kind of "Boczonodi" recumbent honeycomb is popular in Hungary. It is 1056mm long, 520mm wide and 560mm high, and can accommodate 24 nests and spleen. In addition, at present, some domestic beekeepers use 16 horizontal beehives.
1789, huber f, a famous Swiss naturalist for the blind, improved the single-frame glass observation box invented by Maladi 1652, and developed the page beehive. Page beehive is composed of 12 rectangular frames of 305×254 ×32mm connected by hinges, and there is a small nest door at the front and bottom of each frame. When the frame is closed, it becomes a hive. When it is opened, you can observe the inside of the hive like a vertical book. When the bee colony is strong, a door can be inserted between the frames to divide the bees into two groups. Page beehive has no practical significance in production, but it has some inspiration for the design of live frame beehive.
1790, France Rocca d developed a cabinet beehive. Cabinet beehive consists of two layers of beehives stacked together, and the upper and lower layers are separated by a grid similar to the king's board, so that bees can pass up and down; There are openable doors on the front and side of each floor. The hive door is located at the bottom of the hive. The beehive adopts a movable frame beam with a width of 40mm and a thickness of 14mm. Both ends of the frame beam are widened to separate the bee path. The cross section of the frame beam is an inverted triangle, and its apex is used as the standard for building the spleen of bees. The nest and spleen built by this frame beam do not adhere to each other. Rocca's frame beam design was a unique and meaningful pioneering work at that time, and Lang spoke highly of it.
Although some problems have been initially solved by moving the nest spleen and bee path of the frame beam at regular intervals, because there are no frame strips on the other three sides of the nest spleen, the nest spleen still often sticks to the box, which makes it difficult to check the bee colony and collect honey. Therefore, in the first half of the19th century, many beekeepers continued to devote themselves to the research of living beehives.
1807, Prokopovitch P of Russia first developed a beehive with a movable nest frame. This beehive is shaped like a cupboard and divided into three layers, each layer can hold 10 rectangular boxes similar to modern beehives, and each layer has openable doors at the back and side from the back of the beehive for processing bees. 1830, Prokopovitch P used this beehive to raise more than 3,000 bees, and was a beekeeper ahead of the times at that time.
1834, Munn, England, designed a relatively successful living beehive. The structure of beehive is similar to that of modern living frame beehive. The lid of the beehive is herringbone, which is connected with the front wall of the beehive through hinges and opens forward when unpacking. The front wall and back wall of the box body are nailed with wooden strips for hanging the nest frame. Two ends of the upper beam of the nest frame protrude to form frame ears. The rear half of the bottom plate of the beehive is inclined upward, which is convenient for bees to spleen. The nest frame is hung in the box, and the spleen can be lifted from the top of the hive at will when checking the bee colony, so this kind of hive was an ideal hive before Langer's living frame hive was invented. Munn's beehive was patented in France on 1838.
Following Munn, Berlepsch B V in Germany developed a three-layer beehive, the lower two layers were used for breeding insects and the upper layer was used for storing honey, and a beehive frame with widened upper and lower beams was developed as a beehive limiting device in 1853. In addition, many books record that Dzierzon J of Poland invented the movable nest frame in 1845. In fact, the movable nest frame he designed is after 1855. At that time, the nest frame designed by Dzierzon J was almost the same as Lang's movable nest frame, except that the two sides of the nest frame extended downward to form a tripod, so that the nest frame could stand in the box. Dzierzon J designed many kinds of beehives, and finally designed multi-layer beehives. The hive has four layers, each layer has two groups of bees, the doors of the hive are opened to each other, and the spleen of the hive is pushed into the hive from the side.
/kloc-before the middle of the 0/9th century, although there were many kinds of frame beehives, they could not meet the production requirements due to improper design of the nest frame and beehive structure. Until 185 1, Lang, an outstanding beekeeper in Philadelphia, USA, discovered the principle of bee path, integrated the essence of previous beehive design, and invented the living frame beehive, which is indispensable for new beekeeping. The beehive of Langhuo frame is opened from the top, and the nest spleen is hung in the beehive, which can be randomly extracted from the top of the beehive and adjusted horizontally at will; There are proper bee paths between nest spleen and nest spleen in the box, and between nest spleen and all parts in the box; The relay box for storing honey can be superimposed on the nest box.
/kloc-in the summer of 0/852, Lang put all the bees in his own bee farm into a new live-frame beehive to feed. Practice has proved that his design completely meets the production requirements. The beehive invented by Lance in 1853 was patented. In the same year, Shi Lang introduced the skills of making live beehives in detail in his masterpiece Beehives and Bees. Since then, beekeepers all over the country have followed suit, and Lang's live frame beehive has been gradually popularized and applied, and it is recognized as the standard beehive for raising western bees.
The invention of Langhuo beehive declared the end of thousands of years of honey production mode, laid the foundation for new beekeeping and made the development of beekeeping industry take a big step forward. With that invention and application of live-frame beehive, as well as the appearance of many main beekeeping machinery, such as nest foundation machine and honey separator, and their cooperative application, the development of beekeeping production has made a great leap.
Following the invention of Lang's live beehive, according to the principle of Lang's beehive, combined with local bee species, honey powder sources, climate conditions and beekeeping habits, beekeepers in various countries have designed various types of live beehives, such as sixteen-grid horizontal beehives, twelve-grid square beehives and "Dangdang-flame" beehives, which have promoted the development of beekeeping production in various countries.