WHAT IS BEE SPACE
A couple of years ago when the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman was on a Radio 4 comedy show and had to select and argue for a topic worthy of a place in a virtual museum, he chose perhaps the most important but arcane subject in entomology, “Bee Space”. If you love bees, without an understanding of Bee Space, you can not understand how a modern beehive is structured or why, broadly, it functions.
We know that people have been eating honey for as long as we’ve been a distinct species, but at some point, about 8,000 years ago, we moved from reliance on foraging to keeping bees in artificial hives of our own design. This was quite a step. These constructions were made out of wood, or mud, or straw, or both mud and straw and mimicked the normal pied-a-terre that bees, as obligate cavity dwellers, normally sought out for themselves. For the rest of our 8,000 years as beekeepers, we gained surprising understanding of their a bee’s needs. But, we missed something earth-shattering. Tended bees provided a guaranteed source of irreplaceable honey and wax. However, and sadly, in order to get at this bounty, there was only one solution. We had to destroy our beloved bee’s hives by completely disassembling them. This was of course wasteful and cruel.
By the 1840’s several beekeepers appear to have had the same eureka moment – although the plaudit is generally attributed to an American clergyman, Lorenzo Langstroth, who popularised an innovative hive with removable frames. This eureka moment and what made the beehives of the mid-Victorian era viable, was the overdue realisation of “Bee Space”, an recognition that bees maintain a defined distance between their combs in the wild. The lightbulb moment? Well, if you think about it, a bee’s body is about 4 to 4.5mm wide, so for two of them to work side-by-side, they leave something like 8 to 9mm clear from wax construction. This results in the predictable behaviour is twofold, if that if they encounter a space too small to crawl through (<4mm) they glue it up with propolis, (a sticky tree resin that they produce), if they encounter a space larger than 9mm, well that’s construction central! It’s very simple really.
Apply the “Bee Space” observation to making a better beehive a bee hive, as Langstroth and others did, and you find that you can introduce removable frames so long you position them no more than 9mm apart (when drawn with wax). Similarly, don’t leave any holes smaller than 4mm unless you the want work of cleaning up.
Now, it turns out that Neil Gaiman is a keen beekeeper, we get everywhere, and he’s right, Bee Space is such an amazingly simple finding and yet so significant in the management of one of our most economically important livestock animals that it deserves to be displayed proudly in any museum. Now you know, go shout it from the roof tops. Size does matter! Apparently.
See also: http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/bsp.html
