We've all heard that modern beekeeping is in trouble, but The Barefoot Beekeeper opened my eyes to problems that I hadn't considered.  Yes, large-scale beekeepers are mean to their bees, stressing them out by stealing all of their honey and then feeding them nutrient-free corn syrup to get them through the winter.  The bees are often given access to only one type of pollen, which leaves them perpetually malnourished, and they have to put up with pesticides in their foraging grounds and even in their hives.  We truck bees across the nation, letting pests and diseases piggy-back with the traveling bees and spread to other areas.  But there's a lot more to the decline of honeybees than that.

According to PJ Chandler, the honeybee decline began nearly as soon as the Langstroth hive was invented.  For those of you who don't keep bees, Langstroth hives are the wooden boxes you're likely to see in modern apiaries.  These hives are built out of wooden boxes with moveable frames inside, the combination of which allows us to easily look through a whole hive like paging through a book. 

The Langstroth hive replaced a much more lethal method, in which bees were kept in skeps that had to be destroyed to harvest honey, so it was lauded as a great invention at the time.  However, Chandler argues that the Langstroth hive harms bees in several ways:

• Drastic temperature changes --- In a natural hive, bees maintain a temperature of 94 degrees Fahrenheit year round.  When we open a Langstroth hive to page through those frames, the temperature in the hive drops dramatically even on a warm summer day.  Did you know that varroa mites can only reproduce at temperatures below 92 degrees?  Chandler doesn't have data to back this up, but his thesis feels sound --- the temperature spikes in the Langstroth hive make it easier for mites to gain a toehold, and the loss of heat also stresses out the bees who have to work hard to bring the hive back up to optimal levels.
  
• Premade foundation --- As I've written previously, the cells in the foundation most beekeepers buy are larger than the natural cell size.  These large cells promote the spread of varroa mites.
  

In addition, we have to consider other aspects of modern beekeeping, such as the tendency to concentrate our hives in large apiaries.  As I mentioned about my native bee nests, if you house a lot of bees together, pests and diseases are much more apt to spread through the populations.  This makes me wonder if we wouldn't be better off keeping our hives on opposite sides of the property rather than close together.

All of that said, most of us aren't ready to go back to tearing skeps apart and killing colonies just to get at the honey.  Stay tuned for a modern solution that still keeps the bees healthy.