The Industrial Revolution eventually reached beekeeping. In the 19th century, as agriculture and production mechanized, and saw the arrival of all sorts of innovations, so did beekeeping.

It was not just Reverend Langstroth’s patented hive – which beekeepers still use – that emerged. And as with today’s trade in beekeeping innovations, some had merit, perhaps many did not. The critic quoted below made perhaps wise points about the phenomenon in general, whether or not he was right about the specific example he pilloried, Bevan’s Cross Bar Hive.

Thomas Miner wrote in 1849:

During the last twenty years, many new and useless bee-hives have been palmed off on the ignorant and too confiding bee-keepers of our country. Men who have had sufficient brains to devise some new plan and style of hive that did not before exist — who never understood a single principle of the management of bees correctly, have, by dint of unblushing falsehood and impudence, bled the bee-keeping community pretty freely. There seems to be a greater cloud of darkness hanging over the management of bees, than over any other branch of rural economy.¹⁾Thomas B. Miner, The American bee keeper’s manual: being a practical treatise on the history and domestic economy of the honey-bee, embracing a full illustration of the whole subject, with the most approved methods of managing this insect through every branch of its culture, the result of many years’ experience, New York: C. M. Saxton, 1849, p. 117.

Thomas Miner did not like Thomas Bevan’s top bars, and suggested not using such.

Every new-fangled ”patent” hive that is brought along, is represented as the ne plus ultra of improvement, and the very acme of perfection ; and the lesson that is so glibly recited by their vendors, of the wonderful and astonishing merits of their inventions, often causes one to become duped again and again, until he gives up in despair, and returns to his first love — the simple box and brimstone management of ages past. ³⁾Source: Thomas B. Miner, The American bee keeper’s manual : being a practical treatise on the history and domestic economy of the honey-bee, embracing a full illustration of the whole subject, with the most approved methods of managing this insect through every branch of its culture, the result of many years’ experience, New York: C. M. Saxton, 1849, pp. 117-8.

His view on the proliferation of beekeeping and hive gizmos, gadgets and purported improvements:

But a wise Providence has so ordered, that the bee requires merely the simplest tenement. Screens, ventilators, valves, &c., are but hindrances to their natural prosperity, and the thousand and one complicated inventions of the day are but so many deceptive tricks of the astute and keen, to filch our pockets of a few spare dollars.