| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Historic Preservation Office.
Additional Information, 2024:
The Apiary/Bee House is a one-story shed with a square form. The hip roof is covered with standing seam metal roofing that was added in 2019. Atop the roof is a cupola, also built in 2019. It is meant to replicate the original cupola that is seen from afar in an historic photograph. The cupola has a hip roof covered with standing seam metal roofing, vertical board walls, and openings filled with louvered panels. The walls of the building are covered with wood lap siding. One wall has four rows of narrow horizontal slits, one wall features a small opening filled with a single light, one wall is plain with no openings, and one wall has the main entrance filled with a four-panel steel door with lunette window and narrow horizontal slits along the water table. The stone foundation is thick and raised on one end, where it has a large opening leading into an exposed lower level.
The interior of the bee house has an unfinished ceiling and unfinished walls. The wood floor replaced the original rotted wood floor. Three of the walls extend over the thick stone foundation. In one corner is a stone-constructed chimney. Along one wall there is some framing suggesting shelves or cabinets that would have been used for hives in traditional bee houses.
Bee Houses
Bee houses were developed largely in Germany, Switzerland, Poland, and western France to provide protection and security for the bees and ease of use for beekeepers. Bee houses were largely sheds with slits in one wall for bee access. On the interior, along this vented wall, a frame for shelving or cabinets was built to house box hives or skeps (hives of woven straw that looked like upside-down baskets. Bee houses were not universal or required for bee keeping. Some beekeepers used hollowed out logs for hives, and some used skeps out in the open. But common to all beekeepers prior to 1851 was the fact that to extract honey, hives would have to be destroyed as the bees constructed their combs directly onto the hive walls. And, when the combs were destroyed to get honey, the bees would die before they could construct new hives, so beekeepers would have to gather wild swarms each year to produce honey.
This was the case in the United States until 1851, when L.L. Langstroth invented a moveable frame hive that could be stored inside a box. When the beekeeper wanted to extract honey, he/she only had to take our one or more frames, spin the honey out of the comb and return it to the box. He also invented “bee space,” a small space between the frames and the boxes that encouraged the bees to make comb in the frames and not on the box walls. These improvements meant that beekeepers could save bee swarms after extracting the honey.
Langstroth’s invention, which he patented in 1852, revolutionized beekeeping. The boxes that stored the frames could be easily handled and moved, meaning that the beekeeper could take the bees to the best locations to get pollen rather than have the bees come to a stationary location, although that was still an option. There are many historic photographs of apiaries consisting of dozens of boxes out in the open on farms.
Of course, bee houses could still be used to store the bee boxes, but many beekeepers thought that building a bee house was an unnecessary luxury and expense, since the new bee boxes did not need as much protection from the elements as older skep hives. And Langstroth, himself, argued against the construction of bee houses. Some beekeepers who immigrated from European areas where bee houses were common brought this type of beekeeping with them to the United States as an ethnic tradition. An example of this is the bee house at the Swiss Historical Village in New Glarus, which is a replica of a bee house constructed by a Swiss immigrant in that area. Bee houses were common in Germany and since the original owner of this farmstead was named Zimmerman, it may be that he brought this ethnic tradition with him to the United States as well.
Bee houses related to the United States that are either extant or found in illustrations in beekeeping manuals range from highly decorative small buildings suitable for formal gardens to simple rectangular sheds. The clue that the shed is a bee house is the placement of narrow slits in one or more walls to allow bees to come and go.
The Zimmerman bee house is very reminiscent of the bee houses in Europe in that it is a square shed with little decoration. Again, the fact that it is a bee house is only seen in the wall with the narrow slit openings. Bee houses are not used as much in Europe anymore, except for Slovenia, where bee keeping is a major agricultural pursuit. The Slovenian bee houses are similar to the Zimmerman bee house in that they are usually square with hip roofs. But, the Slovenian bee houses are often highly decorative with folk art painting.
Carol Cartwright, 2024
e viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office. |
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