It’s because Langstroth understood “bee space”. Simply put, bee space is a gap of around 6 – 8mm. It is the space that is too large for the bees to fill with propolis, too small to fill with comb but just right for crawling around in. By designing a hive with this exact space between components – between the frames, the frames and the hive walls, and the frames and the roof – it became possible for the frames to remain unstuck and to therefore be removable. The bees built their comb inside the parameters of the wooden frame and regular inspections by the beekeeper kept the frames loose. So, modern beekeeping is premised on the very precise measurement of the body of a honeybee and how it uses space inside a hive.

Nearly a century later, in the 1940s, Le Corbusier was also preoccupied with creating a scale based on the dimensions of the body of another species – humans. This measuring system would inform the proportions of some of his buildings, interiors and even furniture. Le Corbusier’s system, the Modulor, was a scale based on the dimensions of a man with a raised arm. The scale of the human body leant itself well to buildings not only because of a practical fit, but also because the ratios of shoulder to elbow and elbow to hand. These ratios reflect universal geometric rules of proportion observed in the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio. Le Corbusier used the proportions in his much lauded Unité d'habitation (1952) project in Marseille, France. This apartment block has become a template for so much multi-residential building.

Le Corbusier’s Modulor scale, however, did not replace the imperial or metric systems of measurement and was quite justifiably criticised for its anthropocentric bias. The height of the man pictured was quite arbitrary. What is the average height of a man anyway? And how does that position women or children or people of various ethnicities with various heights and body shapes?

In other words, Langstroth’s “bee space” legacy has been more enduring than Le Corbusier’s efforts but both designers based a lot of their work on the study of bodies in their designed spaces.

Pre-fabrication:

This preoccupation with designing around the scale of bodies was only one similarity between modern beekeeping and modernist architecture. Modernism was a post-industrial movement that promoted a break with the styles of the past that were often historic or nostalgic in sentiment. It didn’t lean on the past for its credentials. It was optimistic, it embraced minimalism and rejected ornamentation.

Box hives, such as the Langstroth design, embraced many of the hallmarks of modernism. Box hives represented a break with the beehives of the past. To this day, many agricultural aid agencies working in developing countries seek to “modernise” so-called inefficient traditional beekeeping methods such as the cylindrical woven hives, log hives and clay hives that have been used for millennia. Box hives often use industrially manufactured, prefabricated components that are easy to assemble, are modular, have standardised components and dimensions, and interchangeable parts.

Modern hives, like many other modernist buildings, even have flat roofs. This makes them easy for stacking on shipping palettes and moving with a forklift on and off trucks. This feature facilitated the industrial scale of beekeeping that has allowed beekeeping operations to work at a scale that was unimaginable in pre-industrial societies. Now, the big operators count their hives in the thousands. This is a long way from the small bee yards managed by apiarists of pre-modern beehives. And this is, arguably, a contributor to the problems faced by this keystone species today.