People have been keeping bees for more than 2,000 years. The honeybee can perhaps be called the only insect that has truly been domesticated. Ancient beehives have been found in Israel that indicate that bees were kept in terra cotta pots in the days when the Bible was written.

The habits of bees have been the same for more than 6,000 years, since the day that God created them in the opening chapter of Genesis. However, bees needed a keeper who could observe their consistent patterns of activity and production so as to utilize their honey in large quantities for the use of a growing population on earth.

In ancient days, honey was harvested along with the comb. The simple reason was that man had not yet discovered a practical way to extract the honey and leave the honeycomb to be filled again by the busy bees. Thus, for many centuries, honey was extracted from wild and domestic hives by making a sticky mess as the comb was removed from the colony. This practice involved much loss of time and effort, both for man and also for the honeybee.

It was not until the middle of the 19th century that someone finally invented a practical way to remove and inspect moveable frames from a man-made beehive so that the honey could be extracted from the hive without disturbing the bees and without destroying the comb. This man has been called “The Father of American Beekeeping.” His name was Lorenzo Lorraine (L.L.) Langstroth, one of the most brilliant and innovative beekeepers that has ever lived. His first calling was as a pastor; meanwhile, his God-given apiary interests as well as his keen observations of one particular pattern of behavior within the bee colony revolutionized the commercial beekeeping industry forever.

Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth was born on Christmas day in 1810. His family heritage was English with a generous mixture of French Huguenot blood. As a young boy, Lorenzo had a strong interest in insects of all sorts. His teacher once reprimanded him for taking time away from his studies to examine flies that he kept in small paper cages!

Lorenzo’s mother was constantly frustrated with the way that her son was continually wearing out the knees in his breeches by kneeling down on stone pavement to observe the comings and goings of ants. He also would dig holes in the dirt, then stuff the holes with bread crumbs and tiny bits of meat. This inquisitive, insightful boy did so in order to observe his tiny ant friends carrying the food back to their colony.

An emergence of a brood of periodic cicadas occurred in 1817, when Lorenzo was seven years old. The appearance of the cicadas caused quite a sensation. The young boy spent many hours watching the cicada larvae emerge from the ground and climb up tree trunks to molt into the adult form. Accordingly, Lorenzo wrote about his experiences and recorded his observations.

After he had finished preparatory school, Langstroth enrolled at Yale College in 1827. A college riot broke out at Yale while he was there. Angry, dissatisfied students refused to enter the dining hall to eat their meal. Langstroth was convinced that this student riot was rebellious and dishonorable to authority. When another student drew a pistol in his face for his refusal to participate in the protest, Langstroth instead calmly walked into the dining room alone.

During Langstroth’s final year at Yale, a religious revival broke out. Langstroth became a follower of the Lord Jesus. The newly born-again believer resolved that he would enter the service of the Lord as a minister of the Gospel. He matriculated at Yale Divinity School to prepare himself for the ministry. During his seminary days, he supported himself by tutoring children in languages and mathematics.

In 1836, L. L. Langstroth accepted his first charge as pastor of South Church in Andover, Massachusetts. That same summer, the young pastor married Miss Anne Tucker, a pastor’s daughter. The family loved to relate how Langstroth had tutored the Tucker family and how a teenage Anne liked to ask the handsome young tutor very difficult algebra problems, just so they could be together. She once brought him a problem considered unsolvable, but Langstroth solved it! He won Anne’s heart and she became his wife. She was a loving, devoted pastor’s wife and mother of their three children.

From time to time, a neurological illness attacked Langstroth. As time passed, with increasing severity the illness would leave him unable to study or concentrate for weeks at a time. The doctors recommended that the pastor might engage in a healthy outdoor diversion to ease the effects of his debilitating illness.

Upon this recommendation, Langstroth naturally turned to his boyhood interest in insects. With great delight, he took up beekeeping, spending hours in his garden observing the small creatures inside a hive constructed with glass walls. He read everything he could about bees. Within a few short years, Langstroth became the most highly respected expert regarding honeybees.

His great contribution was the discovery of what he called “bee space.” In the summer of 1851, Pastor Langstroth lowered the bars on the European hive then commonly in use. He happened to lower the bars by about 3/8 of an inch. To his surprise and delight, the bees did not seal the gap with propolis, a waxy resinous “bee glue” used to seal unwanted openings. Neither did they fill the gap with honeycomb.

It dawned upon Langstroth that if he used the same gap on the sides and bottom of a frame, he could then remove the frames to inspect the bees, look for brood (the young bees), find the queen, extract the honey, or whatever else he wanted to do—all without tearing out the comb or disturbing the bees. It worked!

Thus, the first removable frame hive was born. The bees used the bee space around the frame as a passageway. In the process, Langstroth happened upon the exact width needed for the frame. Any smaller, and the bees would have sealed the gap with propolis. Any larger, and the bees would have filled the gap with comb.

Beekeepers all across the United States saw the brilliance of the new design. They clamored for the new Langstroth hives. The pastor could have become a rich man if he had been selfish or greedy. However, he had no interest in the business aspect of his project, and he was too generous and unselfish to make himself rich at the expense of others.

Langstroth published a book, The Hive and the Honey-Bee, in 1853. The book has now gone through over forty editions and is still in print today! After 150 years of beekeeping, beekeepers still have not improved upon the basic form of the Langstroth hive. Other beekeepers, especially some from Europe, ignored Reverend Langstroth’s patent. Some took credit for the things that he had truly invented. But his contributions stand in spite of the claims of others.

In addition to researching and writing about bees, Langstroth also imported and raised Italian golden honeybees, a superior subspecies from southern Europe. He thought that the Italian golden honeybees would improve the quality of the bee stock in North America. He was among the first beekeepers to successfully raise queen bees for distribution and stock improvement.

During this time, Reverend Langstroth continued to preach as often as he could, although his neurological disease afflicted him all his life. Besides beekeeping, his other diversion was the game of chess, which he played for hours during his bouts of illness.

L. L. Langstroth lived a long and fruitful life. His contributions to American agriculture, when considering not only the bees but also their involvement in crop pollination, cannot be measured. Fruitful fields from Massachusetts to California are his legacy. He had patiently come to understand the unchanging habits that an unchanging God had built into the honeybee from the dawn of Creation. Langstroth also shared that information with mankind as God revealed to him the secrets of the hive for the benefit of man.

The “father of American beekeeping” died in Dayton, Ohio, on October 6, 1895. At the time, Langstroth was living with his daughter and her family, including his great-granddaughter! It was a Sunday morning when he ended his earthly labors; very fittingly, he died in the pulpit while preaching a sermon on the love of God.

Sources and Further Reference:

Naile, Florence. America’s Master of Bee Culture: The Life of L. L. Langstroth. Hebden Bridge, United Kingdom: Northern Bee Books, 2023.