Period Beehives: Wicker Skeps

A skep is an inverted basket made of wicker or coiled straw used in beekeeping for housing bees. The skep is over two thousand years old and straw hives are still used today in parts of Europe today. 

There are many examples of skeps in period illustrations and woodcuts. The word skep is derived from the word skeppa. It is Norse for a container and measurement for grain. It was not until the sixteenth century that this term was used with regards to beekeeping. Before that, the word “hive” was used.

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. Wicker and coiled straw basket techniques were known since Antiquity and could have been used as skeps then.

Wicker skeps, also referred to as an alveary, were woven on a whorl of thin branches of a spruce or fir tree. Dictionary.com defines a whorl as “a circular arrangement of like parts, such as leaves or flowers around a point on an axis.” The branches formed the main stakes. 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.

Wicker hives were daubed with cloam or cloom. Cloaming increases the weather resisting abilities of the hive. There are various recipes for cloam, but the main ingredients are sand, ashes, dung and lime. Straw skeps last longer than wicker. The cloam used to protect the hive adheres better to the straw. This led to straw hives replacing wicker hives in later years because of its ability to resist weather better.

History of Honey and Its use in Period: (Part 2 of 6): Honey Collection

(    This is the second in a series of entries on a brief history of honey and its use in pre-1600's history. 

Retrieving honey is the first step to its use. There were two ways to eat the honey, straight from the combs or strained. The simplest way to separate the honey from the comb is to break up the combs and squeeze each piece into a receptacle. The first honey that dripped out was referred to as “Run Honey”. Next, combs were put into a strainer, such as a bag of woven cotton or other natural fiber or a pottery vessel with holes on the sides. Pressing the combs through the strainer or bag made a second honey. This honey contained pollen and was bitter. It was kept separate from the first honey. Columella describes the process in Rome c. 50 AD[1]:

“Whatever be the number of Honey combs that are harvested, you should make the honey on the same day, while they are still warm. A wicker work basket or a bag rather loosely woven of fine withies in the shape of an inverted cone, like that through which wine is strained, is hung up in a dark place, and then the honey combs are heaped in one by one. But care must be taken that those parts of the waxen cells, which contain either young bees or dirty red matter [pollen?] are separated from them, for they have an ill flavour and corrupt the honey with their juice. Then, when the honey has been strained and has flowed down into the basin put underneath to catch it…the fragments of the honey-combs, which have remained in the bag, are handled again and the juice squeezed from them. What flows from them is honey of the second quality and is stored apart by itself by the more careful people.”

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[1] Although Columella is pre-period, he is referenced in period bee-keeping manuscripts such as Thomas Hill’s “A Profitable Instruction of the Perfect Ordering of Bees”, written in 1608.

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.