Space for bees

These colourful hives belong to a community apiary that uses a corner of Woodlands Cemetery not far from Guinea Pig Zero who has blipped them before now. The bee boxes are still stacked for the winter dormancy when their occupants are provided with sugar syrup to keep them going until the spring flowers bloom and the bees can start collecting nectar again. Then they will be divided into several separate hives, each with a queen and a colony.

Beehives back home usually look rather dingy, like those I blipped in February but they mostly use the same design - and it was invented here in Philadelphia by native son Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth. Born in 1810, he was fascinated by insects from an early age and got into trouble for wearing holes in his trousers studying ants. Later he became a clergyman and a teacher but, suffering from chronic headaches and depression, he took up bee keeping as a distraction.

Langstroth's 1853 Manual for Bee Keepers was revolutionary. Until then, removing the honey meant destroying the hive but Langstroth's invention of the moveable frame (one is leaning against a hive here) allowed access to the combs without harming the bees. He also established the importance of allowing a margin of "bee space", the width of a single one, so that they could move around freely within the bee boxes. As a result the boxes can be stacked one on top of another like a chest of drawers, with the bees able to travel up and down between them, storing honey, while the queen is confined to a brood box at the bottom. The Langstroth hive made large-scale honey production possible so it's not surprising the Rev. is known as the father of American bee-keeping.
It seems a shame that Langstroth's grave is not among those that can be seen in the distance here. He's buried in another Woodland Cemetery in Ohio, whither he moved. Philadelphia does retain his papers though, at the American Philosophical Society library, and urban apiaries flourish in this city.