About Langstroth Cottage
Langstroth Cottage, now the home for the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at Miami University, was once home to Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, the "Father of International Beekeeping." The cottage, an example of Greek Revival architecture, dates from 1856 and was sold to Langstroth in 1859. He lived there for the next 28 years, researching and breeding Italian honeybees in his backyard “honeygarden.”
Langstroth, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale Divinity School, was a Congregational minister by vocation, but a self-taught apiculturist (bee scientist) by avocation. This “gentle minister” wrote the book Hive and the Honeybee, the revised form of which is still the definitive text on beekeeping.
His greatest accomplishment, however, was developing the movable frame beehive, which revolutionized honey production techniques by allowing beekeepers to detect disease, control the hive, and manipulate production.
In 1976, the house was listed with the National Register of Historic Places and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982.
Langstroth Cottage is on Miami’s Western campus, on Patterson Avenue, across from the Shriver Center.
