Beekeeping Adventures: Nucs and Packages

Honeybees come in two different styles of boxes when picked up. The first is a nucleus or nuc. The second is a package.

What are nucs? Nucs come in a Styrofoam container that looks like a cooler. They have five to eight frames inside them. There is a fertilized queen and roughly three pounds of bees. The bees have been busy building combs on the frames. This is known as “drawing out” comb. There is honey on the frames as the frames have been taken from active hives. The queen is already busy laying eggs. The honeybees are ready to go as soon as you place them in the hive. Honey production is faster as a result.

What are packages? Packages come in cages. There is wood on four sides of the cage. The other two sides have screens. There is a fertilized queen and approximately three pounds of bees. The queen is in a queen cage with a few attendants. There is a can of sugar syrup to sustain the bees while in transport.

The queen cage is placed in the empty hive once at the bee yard. The bees are then dumped into the hive. The bees will eventually chew through the candy cork of the queen cage. This takes two to three days. The bees will be busy drawing out comb in the meantime. The queen will then begin to lay eggs. The bees begin foraging for plant nectar as soon as there is wax comb to put it in.

Sugar water will be placed in feeders at the entrance of all of the hives. This will provide food so the bees can focus on building up the combs. Honey can be harvested from a hive started with a nuc in July or August. A hive started from a package can be harvested in September or October. Both harvests are weather dependant just like gardening.

My bee yard will be started with one nuc and seven packages. One hive will be a Langstroth, or Lang, hive. This is the box on a box style of hive. The other seven will be Top Bar Hives also known as TBH’s. This is a horizontal hive using bars instead of frames. Please see the archive for more information on these two styles of hives.

The Lang hive installation will be on May 21^st while the TBH’s installation will be on May 23^rd. Pictures and video will follow in a few days after that. I would love to hear your comments!

Period Beehives: Log Hives

A lesser known type of hive of the medieval and Renaissance time period is the log beehive. The log beehives are very common in North Eastern Europe. The log beehive is still used to this day in that region.

Bees made hives in hollow trees naturally. Early beekeepers would harvest this honey from the trees. Eventually they marked and claimed ownership of the trees and the hives contained therein. Beekeepers also started making their own cavities in hives. These types of hives were most common in the Northern Forest Zone of northeast Europe, which includes East Germany, Poland, as well as Northern Czechoslovakia and Russia. Larger logs were not usually available west of the deciduous forest zone.  There is no record of tree beekeeping found in the Scandinavian countries. It was probably too cold for hives to survive in the winter. (Crane 1999, 135)

Records of tree beekeeping exist from the 1200’s and 1300’s.  The Teutonic Order of Germany secured hereditary rights of bee trees in the 1253. Landowners started limiting the rights of tree beekeepers in the 1300’s. This included making new cavities in trees.   

Log hives were developed and hung in the trees to keep animals from foraging in them. Until 1600, forests were used for hunting and collecting honey and wax. The Thirty Years War of Germany (1618-1648) changed all that. Trees were felled and hives moved closer to the home and placed in collections called apiaries. The switch from tree cavity to log hive beekeeping was caused by a shortage of natural cavities. Trees were felled on land used for agriculture or other purposes. Landowners also prohibited new cavities from being made.

Log hives were often carved with faces and then later whole logs were carved into human form. (Crane 1999, 231) In 1568, Nikel Jacob advises to use poplar, lime, alder, and willow, but not oak wood for making the hives. In the Armbruster Collection of Germany, there are hives made from poplar, lime, oak, alder, beech, sycamore, pine, and spruce or fir. (Crane 1999 p 229) Nikel Jacob describes the hives as being 165 centimeters high by 60 centimeters in diameter. In the Armbruster Museum, examples are one-hundred fifty to two hundred centimeters high by sixty centimeters in diameter.

Two log hives have been excavated from bogs in Northern Germany. The first dates between 100-200 AD. It is one meter high and thirty-one to forty-four centimeters in diameter. There is a horizontal slit near the base for the flight hole. The flight hole is the hole or holes in a hive by which the bees come and go from the hive. The second hive dates between 400-500 AD. It is one meter high by thirty centimeters in diameter. There is a cover held on by wood pegs. The flight holes are at different levels on the hive.

Large logs might be divided into two colonies. The hives were hung from trees or kept on platforms to prevent pest infestation. Most had doors or access holes (Crane 1999, 229) Honey comb was removed from the bottom of a closed top log hive. The beekeeper would take all the honey early in the season or leave enough combs later in the season for winter. 

Beekeeping Adventures: Hive Set-Up Day

Saturday was hive set-up day. Two hives were set-up in Dewitt and eight in Cazenovia. It was a beautiful day with just a bit of wind. Adelle, her dad James, my dad Marty, and Dad's girlfriend Chris all helped out. Andy, the land owner helped out too. Much fun was had as we chose the placement and leveled the hives. I will be back out there tonight to sink and lash down the hives with Andy and Carol, the other land owner. This area in Cazenovia can get very windy. We want to make sure the hives don't get blown over!

Medieval Pic: Hive picture from Northern Italy

Detail of a miniature of beehives with bees. Northern Italy. (Lombardy)

From the British Library

August Quote - Driving of the Bees: Charles Butler, 1609

Driving the bees is part of the medieval process of harvesting honey. Skeps do not have frames that allow for easy inspection of the hive and harvesting the honey. Charles Butler recommends driving the bees rather than smoking them out with a sulfur fire.The smoke from the sulfur fire killed the bees and left a residue on the wax and in the honey.

Below is a quote from Charles Butler's "The Feminine Monarchie: Or a Treatis Concerning Bees and the Due Ordering of Them" published in 1609. He discusses how to drive the bees in order to harvest the honey.

“Around midsummer, early in the morning, invert the skep to be driven. Cover the mouth of the full skep with an empty one. Wrap the join with a cloth to seal the opening. Clap rhythmically on the sides of the full hive. The bees will walk to the other hive. After most of the bees have walked to the empty hive, place it where the first hive was. Bees that are coming back from flight will go in there.”  - Charles Butler

Cover me! I'm going in!

Annotated Bibliography: "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry"

• Tusser, Thomas. "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry". England. 1580. Reprinted Kessinger Publishing.

This is a primary source that focuses on husbandry of all animals. Each chapter is a month of the year. There is an abstract and more detail in the second half of the chapter. Suck topics as when to plant and harvest crops, how to deal with pests, and how to take care of animals are presented. Honey bees are featured in six of the twelves months. This is probably because beekeeping maintenance is repetitive once each phase starts. This is an easy read as it written in high English. The font has been updated to modern English as well.

Burr comb at Four Weeks

Burr comb on the inner cover. 

Burr comb is when the bees build comb outside of the frames such as on the inner cover.                 

Honey bees working on a frame at four weeks after installation

Skep Beehives (Part 7 of 8): Swarms and Honey Flow

This is the seventh part in a series of short articles on skeps in the Medieval through Renaissance periods. 

Catching a Swarm

Skeps are managed by swarm beekeeping. Swarm beekeeping is the practice of making a hive just big enough for the bees to make a home. Swarming is when the queen and some of the worker bees leave the hive to find a new home. Swarms were encouraged by making the skep smaller than the needed space for a colony during peak honey flow. The recommended size ranged from nine to thirty-six liters and averaged about 20 liters (Butler, Ch. 5).

The colony will swarm when it becomes too big for the skep. The beekeeper then collects the swarm and installs it into a new hive. “The swarming months are two, Gemini and Cancer: one month before the longest day and another after.” (Butler, Ch. 5). This type of beekeeping was done in north-west Europe, as far south as the Pyrenees and Alps-Maritime of France where honey flows are in mid to late summer (Crane, p239).

Honey flows are the times of the year when nectar is plentiful. Bees produce and store a great deal of honey. Swarm beekeeping takes advantage of this with the creation of new hives in late spring and early summer. Honey is produced in these hives from the later blooming flowers. 

Skep Beehives (Part 3 of 8): Wicker and Straw

This is the third part in a series of short articles on skeps in the Medieval through Renaissance periods.

Boy being stung by bees; Illustration in a Latin bestiary, England late 1100’s.

Wicker skeps were originally woven on a whorl of thin branches of a spruce or fir tree. According to Dictionary.com, a whorl is "a circular arrangement of like parts, such as leaves or flowers around a point on an axis." The branches formed the main stakes (Crane 1999, p241). Stakes were bent down during weaving and other stakes were added for support as the diameter increased. Wicker skep size and shape is determined by the size and shape of the whorl used.

Coiled straw skeps were made only where suitable materials were grown. These materials were reeds, grasses, or long-stemmed cereals. Long stems, such as bramble, were split with a tool called a cleave and used to join the coils. The tools used to make a coiled-straw skep are a girth and an awl (Crane 1999, p242).

Skep Beehives (Part 2 of 8): History of the Skep

This is the second part in a series of short articles on skeps in the Medieval through Renaissance periods.

The earliest known remains of a wicker skep were from 1-200AD. The example came from a peat bog near Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast of Lower Saxony. (Crane 1999, p251) Wicker and coiled straw basket techniques were known since Antiquity and could have been used as skeps then. The Germanic tribes west of the Elbe were the first to use the straw skep even before the Christian era (Fraser 1958, p11). The Germanic tribes brought the skep west towards the French Channel and north-west into Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Sweden. The Anglo-Saxons brought the skep into Britain (Fraser 1958, p12).

Straw skeps last longer than wicker because the dung and clay mixture used to protect the hive adhered better to straw rather than wicker (Butler, Ch 3). This is called cloaming or clooming (Alston, p11). Straw replaced wicker as a common material around 500 AD when the straw skep was introduced to Britain (Alston 1987, p12). Skeps were not common outside of Europe where differing climates would affect the types of hives used. There were no significant changes to the way beekeepers used skeps until post-1600's.

Top Bar Hives: Introduction

The Top Bar Hive, or TBH as it is commonly known as, is a horizontal hive elevated about three feet off the ground. The height makes it easier for the beekeeper to work the hive. The elevation also keeps water and dampness out of the hive. The width allows the bees to have the room they need to build enough comb. The shape of the TBH is similar to a log where wild bees would build a hive.


The TBH does not have wax foundation or frames. Instead, there is a set of bars for the bees to build comb on. There is a strip of wood on the bottom of the TBH bar to guide the bees to build straight comb along the path of the bar. The straight comb is only of benefit to the beekeeper for use of checking on the hive and retrieving honey. The bees will more than likely build the comb in any direction they deem best for the hive.

Skep Beehives (Part 1 of 8): Introduction

This is the first part in a series of short articles on skeps in the Medieval through Renaissance periods.

A miniature recreation I did

The skep is the universal symbol of bees, beekeeping, and honey. A skep is an inverted basket made of wicker or coiled straw used in period beekeeping for housing bees. The skep is over two thousand years old and is still used today in parts of Europe. There are many examples of skeps in period illustrations.

This is a miniature example of a straw skep I made. It is roughly 8" tall and 10" wide. Full-sized skeps would be approximately 18" tall and 24" wide. The model is too small to add the entrance or flight hole, though not all straw beehives had an entrance door. The beehive could be place on a wooden stand with a carved channel on it to allow bees to get in an out. The channel would be carved the length of the board to allow for better air circulation and to serve as a gutter so rain would not build up in the hive.

Medieval Bee Picture #2

This is the picture I will be basing my wood hives on for the medieval bee yard project. It's very similar to a Top Bar Hive.

Wooden hive on the left being harvested. Swarm being put into the hive on the right.

From the Exultet Roll, made between 1070 and 1100 AD in Monte Casino, Italy. 

"Maies Husbandrie" - Tusser

Quote from "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry", by Thomas Tusser:

                 "Take heede to thy bees, that are readie to swarme,
                            the losse thereof now is a crownes worth of harme:
                   Let skilfull be readie and diligence seene,
                            least being too careles, though losest they beene."

         Book Footnote: "The Proverb says, 'A swarm in May is worth a Load of Hay.'  - T.R."

In May, the amount of nectar, honey, and bees grows almost exponentially. When the colony feels the hive is becoming too full, the worker bees will create a set of new queens. The new queens will emerge and fight to the death to see you will remain as there can be only one. The colony will then take the old queen and about one-quarter of the worker bees and leave the hive to find a new residence. This is called swarming.

Swarming was important in the middle ages as this was the easiest way to start a new hive. Losing a swarm was very costly to the beekeeper. It meant one less hive for that season. The remaining colony takes a while to rebuild its population. This slows down nectar collection and honey production. The swarm would eventually increase its numbers, collect nectar, produce and store honey, and possibly swarm again.