Whats inside a hive

At some point I'm going to do a blog on what happens when I inspect a hive.
Before that I thought I would do something about hives so you can see how they operate without having bees everywhere.

Honey bees have no consideration for us whatsoever.
Left to their own devices they will selfishly set up their colony to suit themselves and have no regards for our perfectly reasonable need to easily get the honey to put on our porridge in the mornings.
In the wild the bees will create parallel sheets of wax comb and as the queen can freely roam between these sheets it means they are a mess of eggs, larvae, pupae, pollen and honey all mixed up together.

This means getting just the honey out is a difficult process and amazingly the bees just don't care. Therefore it is entirely reasonable for us where an animal won't do what we want it to do, to make it do what we want it to do.

Honey bees have been around for about 35 million years but their problems started when we turned up and decided we liked honey.
The process of domesticating bees then started.

It is estimated that humans have kept bees for about 9000 years but we finally sorted them out in the 1850's when an American cleric Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth combined some discoveries about bee behaviour with a hive containing movable frames to produce what is considered the basis of the modern bee hive.

A number of variations on Langstroth's hive were developed and today there are a bewildering array of different types of hive,all designed to make our life easier even if it makes the bees life a bit harder.

It might be tempting to think of honey bees buzzing around our gardens as wild animals and free spirits to do what they choose but the reality is that honey bees are as managed as cows, pigs and chickens.

In the UK there is virtually nothing that could be consider a 'wild bee'
I read somewhere feral colonies will die out in 2/3 years, mostly due to disease or starvation.

At the time of his invention Langstroth said

The Creator intended the bee for the comfort of man, as truly as he did the horse or the cow.
In the early ages of the world, indeed until very recently, honey was almost the only natural sweet; and the promise of "a land flowing with milk and honey," had then a significance, the full force of which it is difficult for us to realize.
The honey bee was, therefore, created not merely with the ability to store up its delicious nectar for its own use, but with certain properties which fitted it to be domesticated, and to labour for man, and without which, he would no more have been able to subject it to his control, than to make a useful beast of burden of a lion or a tiger’

Although said over 150 years ago ,the principle behind the first line of the quote that everything is here for our benefit, still applies.

In the UK probably the most common bee hive is the National bee hive, a rather un-prepossessing collection of boxes stacked on top of each other,
Here's a video on how they work.