Movable frame

Definition

Frames hung with bee space around them can be removed, inspected and returned. That allows disease inspection, varroa monitoring, queen rearing, artificial swarming and non-destructive extraction, none of which is possible in a fixed-comb hive. It also allows comb to be reused, which saves the colony the very large cost of secreting wax.

Where the word gets used loosely

Fixed-comb systems are often described as primitive. Egyptian horizontal cylinder hives allowed non-destructive harvest three thousand years earlier, and the Maya jobon does it without any frame at all. The movable frame added inspection and breeding rather than simply the ability to take honey without killing bees.

Honey records that discuss this

• Ethiopian white honeyClean, sweet and faintly herbal, with a smooth dense texture that dominates the impression more than the flavour does.
• Karakovan honeyComplex, floral and herbal at once, eaten with the wax. Its character is a mountain and a year rather than a species.

Bee records that discuss this

• Caucasian honey beeThe longest-tongued honey bee subspecies, and the one that can work red clover where others cannot. Caucasians come from the high valleys of Georgia and the surrounding mountains, and they carry two distinctive traits: a tongue reaching over 7 mm, and an enthusiasm for propolis that makes their hives genuinely difficult to open.
• Egyptian honey beeThe honey bee of the Nile valley, and the subspecies depicted in the oldest images of beekeeping anywhere — the Fifth Dynasty reliefs at Abu Ghurab from around 2400 BCE show this bee being smoked, extracted and jarred. It is small, yellow, nervous and superbly adapted to desert heat, and it has been progressively displaced within Egypt by imported Italian stock.

Guide records that discuss this

• A history of beekeepingFrom cliff-face honey hunting to the movable frame, the history of beekeeping is a history of one problem: how to take the honey without destroying the colony.
• How honey was produced before modern beekeepingFor most of human history, taking honey meant destroying the colony. The movable frame is barely 175 years old, and everything before it was a compromise between getting the honey and keeping the bees.
• Traditional beehives around the worldLogs, bark, clay, straw, cork, gourds and holes in walls. Traditional hive design is not a ladder leading up to the frame hive — it is a set of answers to different climates, different bees and different economies, several of which beat a modern hive on the terms they were built for.

Question records that discuss this

• What is bee space?The gap of roughly a centimetre that bees leave clear for movement. Anything narrower they seal with propolis; anything wider they build comb across. Every movable-frame hive is built around it.
• Who invented the modern beehive?Langstroth patented the movable-frame hive in 1852, but he did not invent movable frames — Prokopovych built them in the 1810s and Dzierżon was working with movable bars in the 1830s and 1840s. What Langstroth contributed was applying the bee-space principle systematically.
• Who invented the honey extractor?Franz von Hruschka demonstrated a centrifugal extractor in the 1860s. It let honey be spun out of intact comb, so the comb went back to the bees instead of being crushed — which is what made the movable frame economically worthwhile.