Beekeeping (бджільництво, бджолярство, or пасічництво; bdzhil'nytstvo, bdzholiarstvo, or pasichnytstvo). Beekeeping has been widespread in Ukraine since prehistoric times, when the primitive method of obtaining honey by robbing wild hives was replaced by beekeeping. The oldest method involved keeping bees in hollow logs or gums (borti). Beekeepers made the gums and later began to place them high up in trees. This method (called bortnytstvo) was practiced until the mid-18th century, and in some areas—the forests of Volhynia, the northern Chernihiv region, and the northern Kyiv region—it endured to the beginning of the 20th century. Bortnytstvo was replaced by pasichnytstvo, which involved placing hives on tree trunks in forest clearings or orchards. This method is mentioned in documents of the 14th century.

Honey and wax were important items of domestic consumption and were paid as tribute to princes. Beekeeping was protected by the law—the Ruskaia Pravda and the Lithuanian Statute. Honey and wax were important also in foreign trade. In the 15th–16th century the wax warehouses (voskovi komory) of Lviv (established in 1496), Lutsk, Volodymyr (in Volhynia), Berestia, and Bilsk were famous. In the 16th–17th century beekeeping developed rapidly. It spread to Slobidska Ukraine and the Zaporizhia. Most of the honey was used for beverages, but some of it and some of the wax were exported.

With the spread of serfdom and the cultivation of the virgin steppes in the 18th–19th century, beekeeping declined. Sugar making undermined the export of honey. For this reason, by the end of the 18th century the Russian and Austrian governments exempted beekeepers from taxes. Some of the gentry, clergy, monasteries, Cossacks, and wealthier peasants continued to keep bees. In the first half of the 19th century beekeeping was revived. In 1814 Petro Prokopovych, a landowner in the Chernihiv region, invented the first frame hive and thus initiated the modern period of apiculture. He also organized industrial beekeeping and advocated progressive apiculture, particularly at his beekeeping school, which he founded in 1828 in the village of Palchyky near Baturyn.

Petro Prokopovych’s work was continued by S. Velykdan (1819–79), Vasyl Vashchenko (1850–1918) (inventor of an improved hive), Vsevolod Shymanovsky (author of the text Metody pasichnykuvannia [Methods of Beekeeping]), Volodymyr Riznychenko, Yevhen Arkhypenko, Ipolit Korablov, and others. In Galicia Yu. Liubinetsky, Lev Treshchakivsky, Rev. Dolynovsky, and M. Mykhalevych were prominent apiarists.

In 1910 there were 1.6 million hives in the nine Ukrainian gubernias (6.3 million in the whole Russian Empire and 2.5 million in all Ukrainian ethnic lands), 90 percent of which belonged to peasants. As a result of the First World War and the Revolution of 1917, beekeeping in Ukraine declined (in 1920 only 800,000 hives remained in Dnipro Ukraine). It recovered in the New Economic Policy period (1923—1.1 million hives; 1927—1.3 million hives, 52 percent of which were frame hives). The development of apiculture was encouraged through professional agricultural journals, research stations, etc, in both eastern and Western Ukraine. Such apiarists as Mykhailo Borovsky, Vasyl Pylypchuk, and I. Martsinkiv were active in the latter region.

Collectivization and the Second World War resulted in the decline of beekeeping (in 1939 the Ukrainian SSR had 1.3 million hives, and in 1944 scarcely 121,000). After the war it recovered. Large bee farms, inter-collective-farm beekeeping associations, and special state farms for industrial apiculture were formed. In 1967 there were over 2.5 million hives in the Ukrainian SSR, of which almost 1 million belonged to collective farms, 132,000 to state farms, and 1.2 million to individuals. In 1975 there were 2.9 million hives. The annual production of honey was 12–16 million kg (4.1–5.5 kg per hive), including 6–7 million kg of honey for industrial use. Apiculture is most developed in the forest-steppe region, where almost half of the hives are located, and in the steppe region, where over one-third of the hives are located.

Mykhailo Borovsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]