A lighter hand

Two very different beekeepers arrived at the same idea by different roads. Abbé Émile Warré, a French priest, compared some 350 hives of many designs over more than fifteen years before settling on his own, la Ruche Populaire, the People's Hive, meant for anyone with simple tools and his book, L'Apiculture pour tous, which ran to twelve editions, the last in 1948.

A continent away, beekeepers across East Africa had long kept bees in hollow logs and baskets. In 1965 Tredwell and Paterson sketched a hive built on that tradition, and from 1971 two researchers from the University of Guelph in Canada, Maurice Smith and Gordon Townsend, developed it in Kenya for a Canadian aid project into the horizontal top-bar hive: no milled lumber, no imported frames, only local timber and a saw.

Neither hive was built to win a honey show.