Beekeeping was well-established by the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean region, of course. Farming bees presented more challenges in colder climates, where Charlemagne had mandated that every royal estate must keep bees.
In the Mediterranean countries, every region had its traditional form of housing for bees, usually made of pottery, wood or cork. They had hinged doors or open backs that could be covered until time to remove honey. In the north, bee skeps had to be padded with layers of straw and bark to keep the bees alive over the winter. They were usually built on a layer of wicker, often in the shape of a cone; clay and other materials insulated the outside. In wilder places like East Germany and Poland, bee swarms were sometimes kept in hollow logs, perhaps the same logs in which they were found in the wild, or in carved wooden boxes. Medieval Polish beekeepers developed a tradition of carving hollow logs into decorative shapes, often as women with big skirts.
Keeping bees over the winter was not a problem in the Mediterranean, but in northern Europe it was a serious hassle. Honey was the bees’ winter food, but the beekeeper planned to harvest it. One solution was to winter over only a select few hives. Beekeepers collected wild swarms in the early summer, and by September, they chose which hives seemed most viable. These lucky bees kept full honeycombs and had their skeps wrapped for winter; they could survive the cold anywhere south of the Arctic Circle. But most of the bee swarms were killed off with thick smoke. By this method, the medieval beekeeper neatly avoided the problem of getting stung while removing honey, since by the time he sliced off the wax and poured out honey, the bees were dead.
Wax and honey were equally valuable. They were used by churches and the aristocracy; both the majority Christians and the minority Jews required candles in their rituals and services. (The trade of bronze-casting also required large amounts of beeswax.) Paraffin was not known until much later, and sugar was as expensive as silver in medieval times. Poor people used animal tallow to burn lights for brief times at night, and were lucky to have fruit-based sugar (or fruit itself). If a poor man found a bee swarm in the wild, its high cash value would prevent him from even considering making himself candles or cakes.
We think that medieval Europe was about castles and knights, but really it was about fees and fines. Nothing was free in medieval Europe, especially if something valuable like wax was in play. Property owners were quite aware that other people’s bees were carrying off nectar from their fields and gardens. Landowners often collected a fee of honey or wax if they could follow the bees home, and towns collected fees for beekeeping rights over wild acreage. Fines were levied against beekeepers who lured away or outright stole other men’s swarms. In the later period, large-scale beekeepers could be fined if their swarms injured or killed a farm animal, especially if they had not fenced off their hives so that animals could stray too close.