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Bees at work; photo by A. Jaszek

As you may have heard, amateur beekeeping is all the rage these days. Flush with the spirit of urban homesteading and DIY, city dwellers are putting hives on building roofs. In more rural areas, first-time beekeepers are consulting with county extension agents for the best ways to handle a hive that’s swarmed. Here in the Philadelphia area, lots of people don protective gear and regularly wander out into their backyards or climb to their roofs, in order to tend a queen and her subjects.

However, without Philadelphia-born Lorenzo Langstroth, these homegrown hives would not be possible. He is widely known as the Father of American Bee Keeping and helped make bees the most studied insect in the world by inventing the moveable frame beehive.

With colony collapse disorder regularly in the news and the stark reality that bees pollinate one-third of all the food we eat, it’s time to learn more about those fuzzy buzzers.

This year the opportunity for knowledge is yours, as bee scientists and beekeeping aficionados will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Langstroth’s birthday with lectures, receptions and a September Honey Festival (hoped to be the first of many). The year of celebration kicks off this Thursday evening at 7 p.m., with a lecture by Carl Flatow of the Science Friday Initiative, Barbara Ceiga of the Academy of Natural Sciences, and historian Mark Hoffman, and will be hosted by the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild at the Unitarian Society of Germantown.

Click the links for more information about Lorenzo Langstroth, beekeeping and the upcoming Honey Festival.