History of beekeeping in America: from Jamestown to Langstroth and the almond orchards

The history of beekeeping in America begins in 1622, when the Virginia Company shipped the first recorded honey bee hives from England to Jamestown, because the honey bee is not native to the continent. For two centuries colonists kept bees in log gums, boxes and straw skeps with fixed combs. Then, in 1851, Lorenzo Langstroth of Philadelphia built the movable-frame hive, patented in 1852, which made modern beekeeping possible worldwide. Italian bees, the 1922 import ban, federal bee labs, migratory pollination and a run of invasive pests, from the tracheal mite in 1984 to the yellow-legged hornet in 2023, shaped the industry you join today.

This guide tells that story in order, with the dates and numbers recorded by USDA, land-grant universities, state law and historians, and explains how it still affects the way American beekeepers work.

Are honey bees native to America?

They are not. The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, evolved in the Old World and spread through Africa, Europe and western Asia. North America has thousands of native bee species, from bumble bees to mason bees, leafcutter bees and sweat bees, but none of them is a honey bee and none stores honey in large wax combs.

That does not mean the Americas had no beekeeping before Europeans. In Mexico and Central America, the Maya kept native stingless bees in hollow logs for honey and wax long before contact. North of Mexico, though, there was nothing comparable, and the honey bee arrived as a colonial import.

“The white man’s fly”

The first recorded importation came in 1622. As Purdue researcher Maddie Carpenter explained on Oregon State University Extension’s PolliNation podcast, the Virginia Company sent hives from England to Jamestown that year. Those bees were the British black bee, the dark European bee A. m. mellifera of English and northern European farms.

Once established, honey bees moved on their own. Swarms escaped into the forests and colonized hollow trees, so the bee often reached new country before the settlers did. Thomas Jefferson put it plainly in Notes on the State of Virginia, quoted by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello:

• “The honey-bee is not a native of our continent.”
• “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 bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers.”

Jefferson knew bees at first hand. His memorandum books record purchases of beeswax from 1769 to 1783, and Edmund Bacon, his overseer from 1806 to 1822, recalled “a very large stand, more than forty hives” at Monticello. Jefferson also owned Stephen White’s Collateral Bee-Boxes, an English book on wooden box hives first published in London in 1756. He also cited the Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm’s report that the honey bee could not survive the winter in Canada.

Where did beekeeping begin before America?

American beekeeping inherited thousands of years of Old World practice. People robbed wild nests long before they built hives, and beeswax residues in the cooking pots of early farmers show that bee products were used across Europe, the Near East and North Africa from the start of agriculture. The oldest pictures of hives come from Egypt, where a relief of the mid-third millennium BC in the sun temple of the pharaoh Nyuserre shows beekeepers at stacked horizontal hives, taking comb and storing honey in jars. The American entomologist Gene Kritsky tells that story in The Tears of Re (2015).

The hives the English brought to Virginia were their own descendants of that tradition: straw skeps and, increasingly, wooden boxes. Whatever the container, one problem stayed the same from Egypt to colonial Virginia: the combs were fixed to the walls of the hive, so harvesting meant cutting comb and often killing the colony.

How did colonial and early American beekeepers keep bees?

Gums, boxes and skeps

Early American hives were whatever was at hand. In the South, the classic hive was the bee gum, a section of hollow log, often of black gum (Nyssa sylvatica), which gave it its name, set on end with a board on top. Settlers from England and Germany brought straw skeps, and as sawmills spread, box hives of plain boards became common. All of them had the same limits:

• combs fixed to the walls, so the beekeeper could not see the brood or the queen;
• no way to check for disease without destroying comb;
• harvest by cutting out comb, or by killing the bees with burning sulfur in fall and taking everything, an Old World practice settlers brought with them;
• increase only by catching swarms.

Many households also went bee hunting: following foragers from a bait of honey back to a bee tree, then felling it for the comb. Bee trees were a real source of sweetener on the frontier, where cane sugar was scarce and expensive.

Fixed combs vs movable frames

	Log gum, skep or box hive	Langstroth hive
Combs	fixed to the walls	built in removable frames
Inspection	not possible without cutting comb	every frame can be lifted out
Disease control	almost none	brood can be checked and treated
Harvest	cut comb, often killing the colony	remove honey supers, keep the colony
Typical yield	about 20 lb (9 kg) a year	more than 100 lb (45 kg) a year (University of Illinois)

Several states now require removable frames, because an inspector cannot examine fixed-comb brood for American foulbrood. Vermont law (6 V.S.A. § 3029) requires that all hives have frames that can be removed for inspection, with a permit for exhibition hives, and Florida’s apiary rules prohibit keeping honey bees “in containers without movable frames”. Check your own state’s rules before trying a log or skep hive.

Langstroth’s movable-frame hive: the American revolution in beekeeping

Bee space, 1851

The breakthrough came from a clergyman. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth (1810 to 1895), a Congregational minister and Yale graduate, was principal of a school for young ladies in Philadelphia when, in 1851, he designed his hive. According to the University of Illinois, he built it around a simple observation: bees leave unfilled gaps of about 3/8 in (about 9.5 mm), just big enough to walk through. A narrower gap is glued shut with propolis; a wider one is filled with comb.

Langstroth hung each frame inside the box with that space on every side, so the bees never attached comb to the walls, the bottom or the neighboring frames. For the first time, a beekeeper could lift each comb out, inspect it, move it to another colony and harvest honey without destroying anything.

The patent and the book

Langstroth’s hive was granted US Patent No. 9,300 on October 5, 1852. In 1853 he published Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee: A Bee Keeper’s Manual, which went through many editions. The design was easy to copy, and other manufacturers soon built frame hives of their own, which led to long disputes over the patent.

The University of Illinois credits the hive with raising a typical colony’s yield from about 20 lb (9 kg) to more than 100 lb (45 kg) a year. Its frame dimensions became the American standard, and today’s 10-frame and 8-frame boxes, deeps and mediums, are all Langstroth equipment. Our Langstroth hive guide gives the modern dimensions and costs.

Foundation, the extractor and an industry

Two European inventions completed the system: pressed wax foundation, shown by Johannes Mehring in Germany in 1858, and the centrifugal honey extractor, introduced by the Austrian Franz von Hruschka in the mid-1860s. Foundation gave straight combs of worker cells; the extractor let beekeepers spin out honey and give the empty combs back to the bees.

American beekeeping turned these tools into an industry. The American Bee Journal, whose first issue Samuel Wagner brought out in January 1861, counted Langstroth as a contributor from the start and is still published. Charles Dadant, a French immigrant who settled in Hamilton, Illinois, first wrote for it in November 1867 and appeared in its pages until his death in 1902; his son C. P. Dadant bought the journal in 1912 and moved it to Hamilton, where the Dadant family business still makes beekeeping equipment. Dadant argued for larger hives with a deep brood box, a design that became the standard hive in France, while most American beekeepers stayed with Langstroth equipment.

Italian bees, the queen trade and the 1922 import ban

Italian bees after 1859

For more than two centuries, American honey bees were dark European bees. According to Maddie Carpenter’s account on the OSU podcast, the first Italian bees, A. m. ligustica, about ten of them, reached New York City in 1859; imports paused during the Civil War and resumed in 1866. Beekeepers adopted Italians for their gentleness and prolific brood rearing, and a trade in mailed queens and, later, package bees shipped from the South spread Italian genetics across the country. Carniolan bees followed in 1877 and Caucasian bees in the 1880s and 1890s, while Syrian and other imports did not catch on.

The University of Illinois notes that, according to Walter Sheppard’s research, most North American honey bees descend from only “a few hundred” original imported bees. Carpenter’s genetic work, described on the OSU podcast, found that today’s US bees carry mostly Italian and Carniolan ancestry, with a small remnant of the old dark bee.

The Honeybee Act of 1922

In the early twentieth century, Britain suffered heavy colony losses that were blamed on a new parasite, the tracheal mite, Acarapis woodi, described from Isle of Wight bees in 1921. To keep it out, Congress passed the Honeybee Act of 1922, banning imports of adult honey bees. The restriction was extended to germplasm in the 1950s and is now administered by USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) under 7 CFR 322. Today adult queens and package bees may be imported into the continental US only from Canada and New Zealand, and honey bee semen only from Australia, Bermuda, Canada, France, Great Britain, New Zealand and Sweden.

The ban shaped American bee breeding. With imports closed, the country had to breed from the bees it already had, and new stock came only through official programs. The best known is the Russian bee: in 1997 USDA-ARS scientists at Baton Rouge imported about 100 queens from the Primorsky territory in Russia’s Far East, where honey bees had lived with varroa for a long time, and selected them for mite resistance, releasing breeder stock to industry from 2000. Our guide to honey bee breeds in the US covers Italian, Carniolan, Russian and VSH stocks.

The pests that changed American beekeeping

From the 1980s, the protection offered by the import ban broke down, one pest at a time.

Year	Event	Source
1984	tracheal mite first found in the US, at Weslaco, Texas, in July	Texas A&M AgriLife
1987	varroa first found, in Wisconsin and Florida	University of California ANR
1990	first Africanized swarm identified, near Hidalgo, Texas, on October 19	USDA-ARS
1998	small hive beetle confirmed in a Florida apiary	UF/IFAS
Fall 2006	first reports of colony collapse disorder	USDA-ARS
August 2023	yellow-legged hornet confirmed near Savannah, Georgia	Georgia Department of Agriculture

Tracheal mites and varroa

The tracheal mite, the very parasite the 1922 law was meant to exclude, was found at Weslaco, Texas, in July 1984. Three years later came the far more serious varroa mite. According to University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, Varroa destructor was first found in the US in 1987, in Wisconsin and Florida, in colonies belonging to the same beekeeper, and is now found all over the United States.

Varroa ended the era of untreated colonies. Wild colonies in hollow trees, the descendants of three centuries of escaped swarms, died out across much of the country, and managed colonies now need regular mite counts and treatment. In June 2025, USDA-ARS linked the collapse of more than 60% of commercial colonies in losses reported from January 2025, about 1.7 million colonies and an estimated $600 million, to deformed wing and acute bee paralysis viruses carried by mites that showed signs of resistance to amitraz, the main miticide of commercial beekeeping. Our guide to varroa mites explains monitoring thresholds and EPA-registered treatments.

Africanized bees in the South

In the 1950s, African honey bees, A. m. scutellata, were taken to Brazil to breed a bee better suited to the tropics. According to USDA-ARS, they escaped into the wild in 1957 and spread north through South and Central America. The first swarm identified in the US was found just outside Hidalgo, Texas, on October 19, 1990. By 2004, USDA listed them in southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Texas, and they have since spread into Florida and other parts of the South. They look like European bees but defend their nests far more aggressively, which is why southern beekeepers requeen defensive colonies with queens of known European stock.

Small hive beetle and CCD

The small hive beetle, Aethina tumida, native to sub-Saharan Africa, was confirmed at a commercial apiary in Florida in 1998, according to the University of Florida, although specimens suggest it was present from at least 1996. It is now a routine pest in the warm, humid South.

In fall 2006, beekeepers began reporting colonies in which the adult workers had simply vanished, leaving brood and stores behind. By February 2007 the condition had a name, colony collapse disorder. USDA-ARS’s Agricultural Research magazine reported that some beekeepers lost 30 to 90 percent of their hives in winter 2006, and that a survey by the ARS Bee Research Laboratory and the Apiary Inspectors of America found about 35% losses in winter 2007, up from 31% the year before. Researchers looked at viruses such as Israeli acute paralysis virus, varroa and tracheal mites, pesticides including neonicotinoids, and poor nutrition, and suspected a combination of factors.

The yellow-legged hornet

The latest arrival is the yellow-legged hornet, Vespa velutina, a predator of honey bees long established in Europe. In August 2023 the Georgia Department of Agriculture, with USDA APHIS and the University of Georgia, confirmed one near Savannah, the first live specimen detected in the open United States, and the three agencies have since worked to trap, track and eradicate it. Our page on the yellow-legged hornet explains how to recognize and report it.

From honey to pollination: how commercial beekeeping changed

Bees on trucks

For most of the nineteenth century, beekeepers sold honey and wax. In the twentieth, pollination became the core business of many commercial operations, and nothing shows that better than California almonds. Almonds need cross-pollination, and the crop has grown so large that it draws colonies from across the country every February.

The farmdoc daily analysis by University of Illinois economists estimates that the 2024 California almond bloom required about 2.7 million colonies, at two colonies per acre for traditional varieties and one for self-fertile ones, on about 1.4 million acres. On January 1, 2024, 37% of all US honey bee colonies were in California. After almonds, many colonies move on to orchards in the Pacific Northwest, then to honey locations in the northern Plains or to other crops.

Honey production today

USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, which surveys operations with five or more colonies, reported 2025 US honey production of 116 million lb (about 53,000 metric tons) from 2.41 million colonies, an average of 48.0 lb (21.8 kg) per colony, at an average price of $3.05 per lb. North Dakota led the states, on clover and alfalfa. Compare that with Langstroth’s 100 lb: modern yields depend as much on forage, weather and mites as on the hive.

Regional honeys with a long history

As beekeeping moved west and south with settlement, each region found its own main flows, and several of them became honeys with a name of their own. They are still the best way to see how much American beekeeping depends on region:

• Northeast and Midwest: white and sweet clover, the classic light table honey of farm country, with dark, strong buckwheat honey in New York and other northern states.
• Southeast and Appalachians: sourwood, a light, late-summer honey from the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, and tulip poplar earlier in spring.
• Florida and the Gulf Coast: orange blossom from citrus groves, and tupelo from the river swamps of the Florida Panhandle and southern Georgia, prized because it is slow to crystallize.
• Plains and Intermountain West: alfalfa and sweet clover, the base of the large honey crops of the Dakotas and Montana.
• California: sage and buckwheat from the coastal hills, and almonds, which feed bees in February but are rarely harvested for honey.

The same regions also set the calendar. A beekeeper in Minnesota builds colonies for a short summer flow and a long winter; one in Florida may have bees flying almost all year, with more brood, more mites and more small hive beetles. History left the US with one hive design but many beekeeping years.

Why the 10-frame box won, and the 8-frame came back

Langstroth’s own hive held ten frames, and the 10-frame deep became the workhorse of commercial beekeeping because it suits pallets, forklifts and migratory lids. In recent decades, many hobby beekeepers have moved to 8-frame boxes, often all mediums, because a full box is lighter to lift. Both use the same frame and the same bee space, so the change is one of weight and handling, not of principle.

How did state beekeeping laws begin?

American bee law grew out of disease control. Fixed-comb hives could not be inspected, and American foulbrood spread readily between apiaries, so states began passing foulbrood laws and appointing inspectors. Wisconsin’s “act for the suppression of foul brood among bees”, approved on April 1, 1897, let the governor appoint a state inspector of apiaries who could burn colonies still diseased at a second visit and fine owners who sold infected bees or refused inspection. In Texas, the first foulbrood inspection law passed in the early 1900s, was rewritten in 1913 and still underlies the state’s bee laws. That is why beekeeping is regulated mainly by the states, not by Washington, and why rules differ so much from one state to the next.

A few examples show the range today:

• Florida: the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services inspects apiaries, and its rules ban hives without movable frames.
• Texas: the Texas Apiary Inspection Service, organized in 1920 and run from Texas A&M, spends most of its time inspecting commercial apiaries, which gives them the permits they need for interstate pollination contracts.
• Vermont: the movable-frame rule above is written into the statute itself, with a permit for exhibition hives.

Federal agencies play supporting roles: APHIS controls imports and invasive pests, ARS runs research labs at Beltsville, Baton Rouge, Tucson and elsewhere, EPA registers varroa treatments and FDA sets honey labeling guidance. For your own obligations, contact your state department of agriculture or state apiarist; our overview of beekeeping laws by state is a starting point.

Timeline of beekeeping history in America

Date	Event
c. 2450 BC	Nyuserre’s sun temple relief, Egypt: oldest known picture of hives
1622	first recorded honey bee hives arrive at Jamestown, Virginia
1780s	Jefferson records the “white man’s fly” in Notes on the State of Virginia
1851	Langstroth designs the movable-frame hive in Philadelphia
1852	US patent granted on October 5
1853	Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee
1858	Mehring presents wax foundation in Germany
1859	first Italian bees reach New York
1861	American Bee Journal founded
Mid-1860s	Hruschka’s centrifugal extractor
1867	Charles Dadant begins writing for the American Bee Journal
1877	first Carniolan bees imported
1897	Wisconsin foul brood act and state inspector of apiaries
1922	Honeybee Act bans imports of adult honey bees
1957	African bees escape into the wild in Brazil
1984	tracheal mite found in Texas
1987	varroa found in Wisconsin and Florida
1990	first Africanized swarm in the US, Hidalgo, Texas
1997	USDA-ARS imports Russian queens; releases from 2000
1998	small hive beetle confirmed in Florida
2006 to 2007	colony collapse disorder reported and named
2023	yellow-legged hornet confirmed in Georgia
2025	USDA-ARS links commercial colony collapses to viruses carried by amitraz-resistant mites

What does this history mean for beekeepers today?

The past explains several things you will do in your own bee yard.

• Bee space still rules. Leave a frame out of a box, or set an inner cover the wrong way, and the bees fill the gap with burr comb. Respecting Langstroth’s 3/8 in is still the basis of every inspection.
• Leave the brood chamber its stores. Old skep beekeepers who killed colonies for honey had to start again every spring. Take honey from the supers and leave the brood boxes enough to see the colony through winter in your region.
• Every pest arrived by moving bees. Varroa, small hive beetle and Africanized genetics all spread with colonies, queens or cargo. Buy from inspected suppliers, follow your state’s movement rules and report anything unusual.
• Your bees are imports adapted over centuries. American stocks were built from a narrow base of imported bees and then selected here, from Italian queens to Russian and VSH lines. Choosing stock bred for mite resistance continues that work.
• Pollination is now the industry’s backbone. The almond bloom, not honey, sets the calendar of most commercial beekeepers, and it is why disease and pest problems spread so quickly across states.

For more on how bees and beekeeping got here, browse our bee history section. From the first hives unloaded at Jamestown to the trucks rolling into California’s Central Valley each February, American beekeeping has always combined borrowed bees with homegrown invention.

Frequently asked questions

Are honey bees native to North America?

No. The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, is native to Africa, Europe and western Asia. North America has thousands of native bee species, including bumble bees, mason bees and sweat bees, but none is a honey bee. The first recorded hives arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, from England in 1622, and colonies then spread across the continent with settlers and as escaped swarms.

What did Native Americans call honey bees?

According to Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia, Native Americans called honey bees the white man's fly and took their arrival as a sign that white settlement was approaching. Jefferson wrote that the bees generally spread into the country a little in advance of the settlers. Swarms escaping into the woods could move faster than the frontier itself.

Who invented the modern beehive?

Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a Congregational minister in Philadelphia, built the first hive around bee space in 1851 and was granted a patent on October 5, 1852. Bee space, about 3/8 in (9.5 mm), is the gap bees leave open as a passage. Frames hung with that gap can be lifted out without cutting comb. Most American hives today are still Langstroth hives.

Why does the US ban honey bee imports?

The Honeybee Act of 1922 barred imports of adult honey bees, mainly to keep out the tracheal mite then blamed for heavy losses in Britain. The restriction was extended to germplasm in the 1950s and is now administered by USDA APHIS: queens and packages may come only from Canada and New Zealand, and semen from a short list of countries. The ban did not keep out the tracheal mite, found in Texas in 1984, or varroa, found in 1987.

When did varroa mites come to the United States?

Varroa destructor was first found in the US in 1987, in Wisconsin and Florida, in colonies belonging to the same beekeeper, according to University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Moving colonies carried it across the country, wild colonies in hollow trees died out widely, and beekeepers had to start monitoring and treating, which remains the core of the beekeeping year.

When did Africanized bees reach the US?

The first Africanized swarm identified in the US was found outside Hidalgo, Texas, on October 19, 1990, according to USDA's Agricultural Research Service. The bees descend from African queens taken to Brazil in the 1950s that escaped into the wild in 1957. By 2004, USDA listed them in southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Texas, and they have since been found in Florida and other parts of the South.

What was colony collapse disorder?

Colony collapse disorder, or CCD, was the name settled on in February 2007 for sudden losses first reported in fall 2006, in which colonies lost their adult workers while brood and food remained. Some beekeepers lost 30 to 90 percent of their hives that winter. USDA researchers studied viruses, varroa, pesticides and nutrition and concluded several factors probably acted together.

When did migratory beekeeping start in the US?

Moving bees to follow flows is old, but large-scale migratory pollination grew with California's almond industry. University of Illinois economists estimate the 2024 almond bloom needed about 2.7 million colonies, and on January 1, 2024, 37% of all US colonies were in California. Most commercial colonies now travel by truck each year between pollination contracts and honey locations.

Sources

1. What is the North American honey bee? (PolliNation podcast, episode 195, October 2021), Maddie Carpenter and Andony Melathopoulos, Oregon State University Extension
2. Bees and honey, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello
3. Symposium marks milestones in honey bee management, research (December 2010), University of Illinois
4. L. L. Langstroth, Beehive, US Patent No. 9,300 (October 5, 1852), Google Patents
5. History of the American Bee Journal, American Bee Journal
6. Honey bees and other bees: import requirements, USDA APHIS
7. Release of USDA-ARS Russian honey bees, USDA-ARS Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Laboratory, Baton Rouge
8. Honey bee tracheal mite, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, Department of Entomology
9. Mighty mite (Kathy Keatley Garvey, 2008), University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources
10. What's buzzing with Africanized honey bees? (Agricultural Research, March 2004), USDA Agricultural Research Service
11. Small hive beetle, Aethina tumida Murray (J. D. Ellis and A. Ellis, EENY-474), University of Florida IFAS Extension
12. Colony collapse disorder: an incomplete puzzle (Agricultural Research, May 2008), USDA Agricultural Research Service
13. USDA researchers find viruses from miticide-resistant parasitic mites are cause of recent honey bee colony collapses (June 2025), USDA Agricultural Research Service
14. Yellow-legged hornet, Georgia Department of Agriculture
15. Where have all the honey bees gone? To California almond orchards (farmdoc daily 15:30, 2025), B. Goodrich and A. Altschuler, University of Illinois
16. Honey (March 2026 report, 2025 data), USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
17. Fla. Admin. Code R. 5B-54.011, Apiary inspection procedures, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
18. 6 V.S.A. § 3029, Movable comb frames required, Vermont General Assembly
19. An act for the suppression of foul brood among bees in Wisconsin (Chapter 150, Laws of 1897), Wisconsin State Legislature
20. About the Texas Apiary Inspection Service, Texas Apiary Inspection Service, Texas A&M University