History of Beekeeping in America
On December 5, 1621, the Council of the Virginia Company in London wrote a letter noting they had sent "beehives" along with other provisions to the Jamestown colony. Three ships could have carried the cargo - the Discovery, the Bona Nova, and the Hopewell - and by early 1622, European honey bees had arrived on the North American continent for what would turn out to be a permanent stay.
The colonists wanted wax. That's worth pausing on, because the modern association between beekeeping and honey is so strong that it obscures the original economics. In the 1620s, beeswax was the product. Candles, sealing wax, waterproofing, church liturgy - beeswax had industrial applications that honey didn't. The sweetness was a bonus. The wax was the business.
By 1639, colonies of honey bees were found throughout the woods of Massachusetts. By 1650, nearly all farms in New England had colonies. By 1730, colonists had established over 170,000 hives - valuable enough, by the accounts of the period, to rival the price of sheep and hogs.
The bees spread faster than the people who brought them.
White Man's Fly
Thomas Jefferson documented it in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1785: "The bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers. The Indians therefore call them the white man's fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlements of the whites."
The term "white man's fly" may or may not have originated with Native Americans. Some historians trace it to John Eliot, an early Puritan missionary who claimed he heard his Native American translators use the phrase. Whether the attribution is accurate or whether Eliot projected his own interpretation onto his translators is debated. What isn't debated is the ecological reality: honey bees moved west ahead of the frontier, pollinating European seeds and saplings that immigrants had brought, spreading white clover and English grasses, reshaping the landscape before the wagons arrived.
Jefferson himself was, by his own garden books, great at writing about bees and terrible at keeping them. His apiary at Monticello often failed. He had to buy honey from neighbors. The man who articulated the relationship between westward bee expansion and colonial advance couldn't keep his own colonies alive - which is a pattern that has repeated itself in American beekeeping with remarkable consistency ever since.
3/8 of an Inch
Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth was born on Christmas Day, 1810, in Philadelphia. He became a clergyman. He suffered from what would now be diagnosed as severe depression - episodes so debilitating they would sideline him from professional life for months at a time. Between episodes, he kept bees.
In the summer of 1851, Langstroth noticed something that beekeepers had been looking at for centuries without seeing: a gap of 7 to 10 millimeters - roughly 1/4 to 3/8 of an inch - between structures in the hive was left alone by the bees. Smaller than that, they sealed it with propolis. Larger than that, they built comb in it. But the 3/8-inch gap - the space just wide enough for a bee to walk through - they respected.
He called it "bee space."
In autumn of that same year, Langstroth realized that bee space could be applied to a newly designed frame that would prevent bees from attaching honeycomb to the inside of the hive box. Frames that maintained bee space on all sides could be lifted out individually, inspected, and returned without destroying the comb. This was the movable-frame hive. On October 5, 1852, it became US Patent #9300.
The concept of bee space wasn't entirely new - European beekeepers Berlepsch and Dzierzon had worked with similar principles from the 1830s through the 1840s. Langstroth's contribution was applying it to a practical, manufactured hive design that could be mass-produced and used by anyone. His book, Langstroth on the Hive and the Honeybee - a Beekeeper's Manual, published in 1853, became the founding text of modern American beekeeping.
The man was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. His invention - 3/8 of an inch of empty space - made every subsequent development in managed beekeeping possible. Without removable frames, there's no inspection for disease. No extraction of honey without destroying the comb. No queen management. No commercial beekeeping as an industry. One centimeter of air gap, noticed by a depressed clergyman in Pennsylvania, is the reason the modern beehive exists.
The Quaker and the Smoker
Moses Quinby was born the same year as Langstroth - 1810 - and took a different path to the same destination. A Quaker from New York's Mohawk Valley, Quinby established a beekeeping operation that eventually grew to 1,200 hives, making him one of the first commercial beekeepers in the country. He's remembered as both the "father of practical beekeeping" and the "father of commercial beekeeping in America," which are either redundant titles or a commentary on how impractical everyone else's beekeeping was.
In 1873, Quinby invented the bellows smoker - the first modern bee smoker with bellows attached to a tin fire pot. Before this, beekeepers used smoldering sticks, burning rags, or whatever happened to produce smoke in roughly the right direction. Quinby's design gave beekeepers controllable, directable smoke for the first time.
As part of his Quaker principles, he did not patent the smoker. He didn't patent any of his inventions. He gave them to the beekeeping community, free. Tracy F. Bingham of Farwell, Michigan later improved and patented the design in 1903, and the Bingham smoker became the standard - but the core concept belonged to a man who believed his inventions should be shared.
Quinby's book, Mysteries of Bee-Keeping Explained, was published in 1853 - the same year as Langstroth's manual. Two foundational beekeeping texts, published in the same year, by two men born in the same year, who apparently never coordinated. The American beekeeping canon arrived in a burst.
The Jewelry Maker and the Airplane
Amos Ives Root was born in Medina, Ohio on December 9, 1839. He manufactured jewelry. He took up beekeeping in his 20s. Then he started a beekeeping supply company in 1869, and things got weird.
In 1873, Root launched Gleanings in Bee Culture - initially as a quarterly publication, under the pseudonym "Novice." The first issue was received so enthusiastically that it immediately switched to monthly. Subscription price: 75 cents a year. The magazine has been continually in print since 1873 and is now published as Bee Culture, making it one of the longest-running specialty publications in America.
Root and his mechanic, Alva Washburn, created the first usable wax foundation rollers in 1875 - the machines that produced the thin sheets of beeswax stamped with hexagonal cell patterns that beekeepers place in frames as a guide for the bees. Foundation rollers are one of those inventions that sound trivial and were anything but: without manufactured foundation, commercial-scale beekeeping would have been dramatically slower and less predictable.
And then there's the airplane.
Root was a man of wide-ranging curiosity who owned a 1903 Oldsmobile - one of the first automobiles in Ohio. When sketchy newspaper reports about the Wright Brothers' 1903 Kitty Hawk flights reached him, he drove his car nearly 200 miles on primitive roads from Medina to Dayton to see for himself. He watched the Wright Brothers fly in 1904 and 1905. He wrote it up. He sent the article to Scientific American.
Scientific American rejected it.
The Wrights told Root to publish it in his beekeeping magazine. So the first publication to carry an eyewitness account of manned, powered flight was Gleanings in Bee Culture, a beekeeping journal out of Medina, Ohio. The Wright Brothers' achievement entered the published record through a magazine whose normal editorial coverage involved frame spacing and nectar flows. This is the kind of thing that, if it appeared in fiction, an editor would cut for being too implausible.
The Inventions That Made It Scale
The transformation of beekeeping from a cottage craft to an agricultural industry happened through a specific sequence of inventions, each one building on the last:
1851 - Langstroth's movable frame hive. 1857 - Wax foundation, invented by German Johannes Mehring, providing a template for straight comb. 1865 - The centrifugal honey extractor, invented by Franz Hruschka, a former Austrian Army officer working in Italy. He announced it at the Brno Beekeeper Conference in September 1865. The first unit was built by the Bollinger Manufacturer in Vienna. The extractor meant honeycombs could be emptied and returned to the hive undamaged - the single most important efficiency gain in honey production history. 1873 - Quinby's bellows smoker. 1875 - Root and Washburn's foundation rollers.
Before these inventions, harvesting honey meant destroying comb. Often it meant killing the colony. The entire production cycle was destructive by default. Within 25 years - 1851 to 1875 - every tool necessary for sustainable, scalable, non-destructive beekeeping had been invented. The industry that exists today is still built on those five innovations.
5.9 Million Colonies
The peak came in 1947.
World War II had created an unexpected boom. Sugar rationing drove massive demand for honey as a substitute sweetener. Beeswax proved essential for military applications - rustproofing vehicles, sealing armaments - so essential that beekeepers received exemptions from military service. Colony numbers climbed from 4.4 million in 1940 to 5.9 million in 1947. Everyone was encouraged to grow their own produce, and beehives became common in home gardens.
Then the war ended. Sugar rationing ended. Demand collapsed. Beekeepers who had expanded couldn't cover costs. The Agricultural Act of 1949 introduced honey producer subsidies - the beginning of federal financial support for an industry that had just discovered it couldn't sustain itself on peacetime economics alone.
The colony count began a decline that hasn't reversed. 5.9 million in 1947. 4 million in 1970. 3 million in 1990. Approximately 2.6 million in 2026. A 61% decline from peak, spread across eight decades, driven by a succession of crises that arrived like waves hitting a retreating shoreline.
The Mites
Tracheal mites were detected first - July 3, 1984, in bees sampled from a commercial operation in Weslaco, Texas. Despite efforts to contain them that included the destruction of 43,367 colonies, tracheal mites reached all major beekeeping states in less than five years. Beekeepers experienced 75-100% winter loss during the first years of exposure.
Then came varroa.
In September 1987, colonies in hives transported from Florida to Wisconsin experienced sudden failure - the first recorded case of Varroa destructor infestation in the United States. The mite had arrived. It would never leave. The combined impact of tracheal and varroa mites accelerated the colony decline that had been underway since the postwar period, and introduced a new reality: managing bees now meant managing parasites, permanently, with no prospect of eradication.
Colony Collapse
In mid-November 2006, Pennsylvania beekeeper Dave Hackenberg dropped off 400 colonies in central Florida to overwinter. He returned a month later to find most of the bees simply gone. Not dead on the ground. Not piled at the bottom of the hive. Gone. The queen was there. Food was there. A few nurse bees remained with the brood. But the workforce had vanished.
The syndrome was named Colony Collapse Disorder in early 2007. By that point, at least 24 states had reported at least one case. Losses ranged from 30% to 90% of colonies. Some beekeepers lost nearly everything. CCD-affected operations reported total losses of 45%, compared to 25% for non-CCD operations. Before 2006, the historical average annual loss had been 17%.
The cause was never identified as a single factor. Chemical contamination, pesticide exposure (particularly neonicotinoids), lack of genetic diversity, pathogens, varroa, nutritional stress from monoculture agriculture - the research converged on "all of the above," interacting in ways that no single study could fully untangle. CCD as a distinct phenomenon has faded from the literature, but the elevated loss rates it helped publicize have not. The 2024-2025 season recorded 55.6% total colony loss - the highest ever documented since annual tracking began.
The Treadmill
The US maintains approximately 2.6 million honey-producing colonies in 2026. This number has held roughly stable for a decade, which sounds reassuring until you understand how it's maintained.
Beekeepers split surviving colonies every spring - dividing one strong colony into two or three, adding purchased queens, feeding them into production strength. The total count stays stable not because colonies survive at sustainable rates, but because beekeepers manufacture replacements faster than colonies die. The 14-year running average annual loss is 41.4%. The rate beekeepers consider acceptable is roughly 19%. Actual losses are consistently double the sustainable threshold.
The 2.6 million colonies are a number maintained by effort, not by resilience. It's the agricultural equivalent of running on a treadmill - the distance doesn't change because you keep running, not because you've arrived anywhere.
Honey production in 2024: 134 million pounds, down 4% from the previous year. Yield per colony: 51.7 pounds, down 6%. Honey prices: $2.69 per pound, up 5%. Total crop value: $361.5 million. Pollination income: $226 million. The bees arrived on the Discovery in 1622. Four hundred years later, the industry they support generates $621 million annually and loses 40% of its livestock every year.
The hives are still Langstroth's design. The smokers are still Quinby's concept. The foundation is still Root's contribution. And the gap that makes it all possible is still 3/8 of an inch - exactly as wide as a depressed clergyman measured it, in Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1851.