We currently have the seventh generation involved in the business. From humble beginnings, our company has expanded to 10 branch locations nationwide and 4 manufacturing facilities that are located near Hamilton, IL. We are happy to serve the United States beekeepers, as well as many overseas customers. Since 1863, the Dadant family has made quality products from beeswax, a natural and renewable resource.

The Beginning

The Dadant family has been interested in beekeeping for over 180 years. The founder, Charles Dadant, was born in 1817 in Vaux-Sous-Aubigny, a small village in eastern France, the second of seven children born to a small village doctor. He became interested in bees as he helped a neighboring priest remove honey from straw skeps at the early age of 12. Disillusioned with the business possibilities in France, he decided to accept an invitation of an old friend Mr. Marlot, then of Basco, IL, to come grow Champagne grapes and raise bees. In 1863, at the age of 46, he emigrated from France to America and settled in Hamilton, Illinois. The growing of grapes here did not prove to be lucrative so he abandoned them in favor of honey bees. By the end of the Civil War, Charles had nine colonies of honeybees, and traveled with his young son, C.P. Dadant across the Mississippi River to sell honey and beeswax in a neighboring town. His interest in making quality candles grew from his love and knowledge of beekeeping.

Charles was once the largest producer of extracted honey in America as well as one of the first to import queen bees from Italy on a large scale as he was unhappy with the common black or German bees he found here. He began a series of experiments on the size of hives and wrote a great deal on the large hive that appeared in both American and European journals. In 1872 he was offered the editorship of The American Bee Journal, but refused because of his unfamiliarity with the English language. He learned to read the New York Tribune by digging at the words one at a time with a pocket dictionary so that he could then translate it back into French for his wife.

Charles was a dreamer, a man with ideas and determination. He was the experimenter who became more widely known abroad than in his adopted country.

Dadant & Sons - Model C75201 -Deep 9 1/8Inch Grooved Top Bar Frames with Coated Plasticell Commercial Assembled

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