How Apis Mellifera Became Our Go-To Honeybee (Podcast)

In the second episode of the Business of Bees, hosts Adam Allington and David Schultz take us back to the earliest days of beekeeping in Egypt and tell us how humans and honeybees formed a partnership that has spanned thousands of years and several continents.

There are thousands of bee species, but there are only seven major species of honeybees. From those seven, beekeepers have largely chosen Apis mellifera often called the European, or Western honeybee, for its unparalleled ability to produce honey, and to be deployed by the millions to pollinate crops.

According to archaeological evidence, humans have been keeping honeybees for about 9,000 years. Often keeping bees in clay pots, hollowed out logs, or woven skeps.

Now let’s fast forward to the 1600s, when honeybees came over with the first European settlers who were trying to replicate the “land of milk and honey” they’d read about in the Bible.

So, they brought the cows, and they brought the bees.

“The forests were very healthy because of Native American forestry practices,” Tammy Horn Potter, Kentucky’s state apiarist with the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, said. “By most accounts, the honeybees did better than the settlers did.”

The practice of beekeeping remained largely unchanged until 1851, when Lorenzo Langstroth, a Presbyterian minister from Philadelphia, invented the modern beehive.

As a means of curing his seasonal depression, Langstroth was advised by a doctor to spend as much time as possible outdoors. During this time he became fascinated with feral colonies of honeybees. Eventually Langstroth had an epiphany, which is now called simply, the “bee space.”

What he discovered was that three-eighths of an inch was the precise space needed between honeycomb frames to make bees happy. Langstroth’s discovery, combined with a reusable wooden hive box now made it much easier to keep bees. Honey production soared.

Initially, there were three types of European honeybees put to work in the New World. But the Italian honeybees, which were bred to be docile and produce high volumes of honey, quickly became the dominant race of Apis mellifera in the U.S., according to Jeff Lee, a beekeeper and owner of Lee’s Bees.

But, there was a trade-off to using these friendly, gentle bees.

“You always sacrifice something in genetics, and you sacrifice the hypervigilant behavior” with the Italian bees, Lee said.

There are benefits to bees being aggressive, namely that without aggression you don’t fight off parasites that can invade your hive. And that leads us to the current chapter of honeybee history.

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