Thinking with Hives

In The Tudor House and Garden, Paula Henderson notes that apiaries, “although at best only architecture in miniature . . .were vital, if not particularly conspicuous, elements of most gardens.”1 The eight major bee treatises published in England between 1593–1679, as well as many gardening manuals from the same period, devote space to the construc-tion, preservation, and placement of beehives in and around gardens. We see in Thomas Hill’s The Gardener’s Labyrinth a woodcut of a garden, gar-deners, and water pump in action, and in the upper right corner we notice two skep beehives (See Figure 1, next page). These skeps, basket hives made in England from coils of wheat or rye straw, have a single entrance at the base with no internal structure provided for the bees—removing the honey often meant the risk of destroying the entire hive.2 The hives are stationary, fixed objects that are part of a larger network that pro-duced a working garden landscape. Yet they are also lively, embodied, full of activity (as seen with the bees flying about).