The Movable-Frame Hive of 1814 ── The Beekeeper Petro Prokopovych

Taking honey from a hive without killing the bees. Ukrainian encyclopedias name Petro Prokopovych (Петро Прокопович) as the man who achieved this in the early 19th century with a movable-frame hive. He kept bees on an estate near Baturyn, built a frame hive in 1814, and opened a beekeeping school in 1828.

Before the Frame Hive

According to the entry “Beekeeping” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU, published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta; first published 1984), beekeeping in Ukraine began in prehistoric times with taking honey from wild bees’ nests, and people gradually moved to keeping bees themselves. The oldest method was to house bees in hollowed-out logs set high in trees (bortnytstvo). The entry states that this continued until the mid-18th century, and survived in forests such as those of Volyn and northern Chernihiv region until the early 20th century.

This was followed by the spread of a method in which hives were arranged in forest clearings and orchards (pasichnytstvo). Honey and beeswax were not only used by the beekeepers themselves but also became tribute paid to princes and goods traded abroad.

The entry “Beekeeping” in the Great Ukrainian Encyclopedia (VUE, published 2021, written by U. Movna) likewise describes this transition as three stages: gathering honey from wild bees, bortnytstvo using tree hollows, and pasichnytstvo arranging hives.

Who Was Petro Prokopovych

According to the IEU entry “Prokopovych, Petro” (first published 1993), Prokopovych was born on 10 July 1775 in the village of Mytchenky near Baturyn (then part of the Nizhyn Regiment), and died on 3 April 1850 in the village of Palchyky, Chernihiv Governorate. After studying at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he served in the military from 1794 to 1798, and after retiring devoted himself to beekeeping on his own estate.

The Movable-Frame Hive of 1814

The same entry states that Prokopovych invented the movable-frame hive in 1814, greatly advancing beekeeping technology, and further states that he was the first in the world to extract pure comb honey without killing the bees.

The same encyclopedia’s entry “Beekeeping” also states that in 1814 Prokopovych, then a landowner in the Chernihiv region, invented the first movable-frame hive, which marked the beginning of modern beekeeping. VUE’s entry “Beekeeping” states that in 1814 he invented “the world’s first movable-frame hive that could be taken apart.” Both encyclopedias agree on 1814 as the year of the invention.

The claim of being “the first in the world” is best read as the encyclopedias’ own assessment. The American Lorenzo Langstroth obtained a US patent (No. 9,300), dated 5 October 1852, for a hive using a movable frame. However, neither IEU nor VUE compares the structural differences between Prokopovych’s hive and Langstroth’s hive. This article does not address which one was the direct ancestor of today’s hives.

The Beekeeping School at Palchyky

According to IEU, Prokopovych opened a beekeeping school in the village of Palchyky near Baturyn in 1828. The encyclopedia calls it the first scientific beekeeping school in Eastern Europe, and states that it trained around 600 beekeepers between 1828 and 1874. It also credits him with being the first in Eastern Europe to establish modern beekeeping terminology.

He tried to buy a printing press to publish his lectures in Ukrainian, but was blocked by the authorities of the Russian Empire. Some of his papers appeared in Russian academic journals, and his lecture notes in Russian were published after his death and translated into German, French and Polish. How the Russian Empire restricted Ukrainian-language publishing in the 19th century is covered in “From the End of Cossack Autonomy to the Ban on Ukrainian-Language Publishing.”

VUE names S. Velykdan, V. Vashchenko and V. Ryznychenko as people who followed Prokopovych in spreading frame-hive beekeeping.

Hive Counts Vary Widely Between Sources

The two encyclopedias give different figures for the same year regarding the later scale of beekeeping in Ukraine. For 1910, IEU gives 1.6 million hives in “nine Ukrainian governorates,” while VUE gives 67,911 apiaries and 630,600 hives in “the Ukrainian governorates of the Russian Empire.” Since neither source explains the scope or method of counting, this article cannot determine which figure is correct.

Both encyclopedias agree that the number of hives fell sharply after both the First World War and the Second World War.

Beekeeping in Ukraine Today

According to VUE, a beekeeping research institute was established in Kyiv in 1989, and it is now a state research institution called the “P. I. Prokopovych Institute of Beekeeping.” Ukraine has a Law on Beekeeping (Law No. 1492-III) dated 22 February 2000, which remains in force following amendments in March 2026. VUE states that as of 2020, Ukraine had 400,000 beekeepers and 1.2 million bee colonies.

Looking at Ukraine’s honey production (official figures reported by the Ukrainian government) in FAOSTAT, the statistical database of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), gives the following:

Comparing European countries in the same database, Ukraine’s production ranked second after Russia from 2022 to 2024 (Russia’s 2024 figure is an FAO estimate).

Traditional beekeeping itself has also been recorded. By Order No. 228 of 6 July 2022, Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy added “bortnytstvo” (tree-hollow beekeeping) in the villages of Shpyli and Rudnia-Shpylivska, in the Ivankiv hromada, Vyshhorod district, Kyiv Oblast, to the national list of intangible cultural heritage. Ukraine’s National Intellectual Property Office (UKRNOIVI) has registered “Zakarpattia honey” (24 July 2024) and “Steppe honey of Frumushyka” (3 September 2025) as geographical indications.

How honey is used at the table — for example, paired with kutia on Christmas Eve — is touched on in the article on Ukraine’s table.