400 Years of Beekeeping in America

Today (July 4th, 2026), America turns 250 years old. It got us thinking about another anniversary: honeybees have only been on this continent for about 400 years. From Jamestown to a Quaker who gave away his best invention, here's the odd, inventive history of American beekeeping.

Long before there were backyard beekeepers, bee suits, or even America itself, someone had to bring the first honeybees here. 

The first hives that landed in Jamestown set off 400 years of innovation, mistakes, discoveries, and unlikely characters that shaped the way we keep bees today.

1622: A Cargo of Bees

In late 1621, the Virginia Company of London wrote ahead to Jamestown to say they were sending seeds, fruit trees, pigeons, and beehives. The ships arrived the following spring, carrying the dark bee of northern Europe, Apis mellifera, into a continent it had never touched. 

Honeybees are not indigenous to North America. Everything from our backyard hives to million-colony almond contracts, started with that one shipment.

It didn't go smoothly for the settlers but the bees seemed to manage just fine...a few weeks after the landing, Jamestown was attacked and nearly a third of the settlement was killed. The next documented mention of honeybees in Virginia doesn't show up until 1648, at an apiary run by a man making mead from their honey, so it’s probably safe to assume they were doing alright on their new continent.

1852: Reinventing the Hive

For the first couple centuries, beekeeping in America used the same fixed-comb boxes and skeps that the first settlers brought with them. This meant cutting the comb out and destroying it for inspection and other maintenance. That changed in 1852, when Lorenzo Langstroth, a Philadelphia minister, patented the first practical movable-frame hive in the country.

Langstroth’s discovery was simple but profound and it’s shaped how we keep bees today. He noted that the bees leave a gap of roughly three-eighths of an inch alone, neither filling it with comb nor sealing it shut with propolis. 

It sounds like a small observation, but it restructured the entire relationship between beekeeper and colony. Design a hive around that “bee space” and the frames lift out clean, comb intact. 

Langstroth never made much money from the idea. His patent was widely copied, and he spent years trying to defend it. The invention outlived the business dispute, which tends to happen with the good ones.

1853: Go West Young Bee

Roughly 230 years after landing on the East Coast honeybees finally made their way to California. Interestingly it was by boat, with a brief trek over rail and mule then steamship to San Francisco rather than overland migration that got them there. 

Christopher A. Shelton bought 12 hives in Aspinwall, Panama, from a New Yorker, then moved them across the Isthmus of Panama by mule and rail (the Panama railroad wasn't finished yet), and finished the trip up the Pacific coast by steamship to San Francisco, arriving March 14, 1853. 
Unfortunately, only 1 of Shelton's 12 hives survived the whole trip. Fortunately, that single surviving hive threw off three new swarms and is the traceable root of California's beekeeping industry.

1869: Beekeeping Equipment at Scale

A.I. Root (Amos Ives Root) was another interesting contributor to American bee history. Like many of us, his journey began when a swarm caught his attention. Originally in the jewelry manufacturing business, his bee curiosity turned into a substantial business endeavor and lifelong obsession. He founded the A.I. Root Company in 1869, in Medina, Ohio, to manufacture beehives and beekeeping equipment. The business grew fast and by 1880 he was shipping the equivalent of four railroad cars of hives, tools, and equipment a day.

In January 1873, he launched a magazine called “Gleanings in Bee Culture”, originally created to keep up with the massive volume of questions he was fielding from customers. It's still being published today under the name Bee Culture magazine, making it one of the longest continuously running trade publications in the country. He also wrote The ABC of Bee Culture in 1877, an encyclopedia of the craft that beekeepers nicknamed "the beekeeper's bible."

The company itself is still around today, though they wound down the production of beekeeping equipment in the mid 1900s and shifted into candle-making. It's still family owned today, run by one of Root's descendants under the name Root Candles.

1873: A Quaker Makes the First Practical Smoker

After 4 decades of keeping bees, Moses Quinby grew his apiary in the Mohawk Valley of New York state to something like 1,200 hives. This was a staggering number for the era but more importantly, it led to an invention we still use today: the smoker. 

Smoking bees to calm them wasn't new when Quinby started tinkering. American beekeepers of the time were using anything from a lit pipe in the mouth to a plugged tin tube, both were clumsy and prone to smoking out the beekeeper as much as the bees. 
What Quinby did in 1873 was mount a hand bellows directly beside a tin firebox so the whole thing worked one-handed, upright, and reliably. That basic shape, bellows plus firebox plus spout, is still recognizably what beekeepers carry today.

Remarkably, he didn't patent it. He was a Quaker, and Quakers of that era didn’t do such things, so he just gave the design to the beekeeping community. In addition to his smoker, Quinby was also responsible for building one of the country's first honey extractors and the first practical uncapping knife. 

1909: The Bees Go to Work

By the late 1800s, farmers started noticing what bees did for a crop beyond honey, and by 1909 we had the earliest documented case of a beekeeper renting hives for pollination in a New Jersey apple orchard. This is generally cited as the start of pollination-as-a-service in America. 

From there onward, orchard design and paid pollination contracts start becoming more common as cars and better roads make it practical to move hives to where they're needed, not just where they happen to be. Pollination turned beekeeping into a service industry, not just a source of sweetener and wax. 

By the 1940s, beekeepers started contracting specifically for alfalfa seed pollination, making it one of the first large-scale, structured pollination markets.

1973: Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut

By 1973, California's almond bloom needs outgrew what in-state colonies could cover, so out-of-state beekeepers started trucking hives in. This is really the birth of almonds as the dominant migratory event.

Today, roughly two out of every three managed honeybee colonies (about 1.5 million) in the country now travel to the Central Valley each February for a bloom that lasts three or four weeks. It’s become the single biggest paycheck of the year for a lot of commercial operations, even bigger than what they make from honey.

1987: The Year of the Mite

The latter half of the twentieth century wasn't kind to American bees. The pesky Varroa mites showed up in Wisconsin in 1987 and spread to the lower 48 states helping to wipe out roughly 60 percent of the country's managed colonies before Gangsta’s Paradise was topping charts.

1990: Killer Bees Cross the Rio Grande

If the Varroa mite wasn't enough, Africanized bees crossed the Rio Grande in 1990. These so-called “killer bees” were far more aggressive than our gentler honeybees and were impossible to fully keep out. Interbreeding was inevitable, but it turns out cold winters are lethal to African-ancestry bees, so there's a hard climate ceiling on how far north they can go. 

Fortunately, the nationwide "killer bees are coming for everyone" panic from the 80s never materialized. They settled into Texas, the Gulf states, Florida, and the southern parts of the Southwest and California, and that's basically where they've stayed.

2006: The Hives Go Quiet

Then in 2006, a Pennsylvania beekeeper wintering his colonies in Florida reported something new: hives emptying out with no dead bees left behind to explain it. Colony Collapse Disorder became a household phrase within a year.

The causes turned out to be layered, mostly varroa-transmitted viruses compounding other stress, not one single villain. Whatever the cause, the damage was real, and we’re still battling it today. 

2012: New Kids on the Block

The publication of “Top-Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee Health”, co-written by Les Crowder and Heather Harrell signaled a growing movement toward a more natural form of beekeeping. 

Les Crowder had worked commercial Langstroth operations and started building his own top bar hives using organic, chemical-free methods. He's one of the earliest documented American advocates and has been teaching beekeeping classes since 1983.

What Four Centuries Add Up To

Four centuries in, the immigrant honey bees and the descendants of their immigrant beekeepers are still working together in diverse and interesting ways to pollinate, produce wax, and make honey. 

Looking back over the history of beekeeping in America, one thing is clear: there’s no single "right" way to keep bees. Every advance was because someone asked, “What can we do better?” 

That same curiosity continues today. 

History can’t tell you which hive to buy or which methodology to follow. What it does reveal is that beekeeping has always been a craft of observation, experimentation, and learning from the bees.

That's a tradition worth carrying forward and remains at the heart of Bee Built.