Charles Dadant

Charles Dadant

Charles Dadant (born May 20, 1817 in Vaux-sous-Aubigny in the French department of Haute-Marne , † July 26, 1902 in Hamilton , Illinois , USA) was a French beekeeper . He is considered one of the pioneers of modern beekeeping in the USA .

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Charles Dadant already worked as a beekeeper in his home country France, but had no economic success. Friends who had emigrated to America invited him to follow them and practice viticulture and beekeeping in the New World. In 1863, at the age of 46, Dadant emigrated to the United States without speaking a word of English . He learned it self-taught with the help of the New York Tribune . Since viticulture turned out to be unprofitable, he focused exclusively on beekeeping. After acquiring a farm, he began his beekeeping career in 1864 with two swarms of bees captured by the then common black bee. The yield of his bee colonies was sufficient to finance their maintenance and expansion of the company.

By the end of the Civil War in 1865, Dadant had nine colonies of bees. His first article appeared in the American Bee Journal in 1867 . In 1872 Dadant was one of the first Italian queen bees to import to America. Together with his youngest son, Camille Pierre (CP) Dadant, he began to sell honey and beeswax across the Mississippi .

After Dadant had initially worked with the European beekeeping technique of hives without frames, he became aware of Moses Quinby and his work The Mysteries of Beekeeping and later Lorenzo Langstroth's work On the Hive and the Honey-Bee through a magazine article and recognized the superiority of the in The honeycomb frame and the magazine booty . He tried out the frame sizes from Quinby and Langstroth and also developed his own frame size in the dimensions 12 "x 13" (30.5 × 33 cm), which he also recommended in a French-language brochure, Petit Cours D'Apiculture , in 1874 . After working in parallel with these frames and the Quinby and Langstroth frames for a long time, Dadant finally decided on the Quinby frame size, increasing the capacity of the hive from 8 to 9-10 frames. Under the name "Dadant Hive", it is still the most widely used type of hive in the world today.

In 1885, Charles Dadant and CP Dadant were given the reissue of Lorenzo Langstroth's 1853 work On the Hive and the Honey-Bee . Charles Dadant also translated this book into French . Dadant published numerous articles in professional journals. Eventually he took over the American Bee Journal and founded Dadant and Sons, one of the first beekeeping tool companies in the world. The company is still owned by the family today; likewise, the magazine is still published by Dadant's heirs to this day.

Dadant measure

Charles Dadant used the Quinby frame with the honeycomb dimensions (without ears) of 480 × 285 mm. His son Camille Pierre Dadant modified the Quinby-Dadant frame around 1920 by shortening the upper support to the length of the long frame.

This modified Dadant frame never caught on in America; it is used today, especially in German-speaking countries, in connection with the brood-happy Buckfast bee bred by Brother Adam .

A disadvantage of this large frame size can, however, be seen as the need for separate frame dimensions for the brood and honey area.

Dadant booty

The Dadant loot was spread worldwide by the descendants of Charles Dadant. The Dadant hive exists in the variants with a maximum of 10 or 12 frames, the size of the brood chamber can be varied by dividing. The variant with 12 frames can be used in both a warm and a cold honeycomb arrangement, i.e. with the honeycomb lanes aligned orthogonally or parallel to the front of the hive.

The great advantage of keeping it in a brood room is that the nest is not torn apart, as is the case with two-pronged pikeperch prey.

The Dadant hive is not to be confused with the Dadant leaf hive and their frame dimensions.

Web links

• History of Dadant