Bees in America

by Tammy Horn

  Danvers, Massachusetts, established a town apiary in 1640. Danvers was started in 1636 after a grant of 300 acres was assigned to John Endicott of Dorchester, England. He called his land Orchard Farm, but eventually, when other families were established near Salem, the two towns merged interests. This community apparently had a thriving beekeeping population: “In 1660, a stand of bees was appraised at five pounds in this town…. An inventory of T. Barnard’s estate, made after he was killed by Indians in 1677, included eight hives of bees.” The town of Newbury, Massachusetts, was fortunate to hire its own beekeeper, John Eales. In 1645, he was hired to follow “his trade in beehive making.”22 Eales would have made straw skep hives, which were popular during the seventeenth century.

  Although it is considered old-fashioned by contemporary standards, the skep hive signaled a remarkable advance in beekeeping. For centuries, Egyptians kept their bees in mud tubes, the Romans and Greeks kept bees in clay pots, and many cultures had log hives, especially those in Western Europe. In fact, the word skep comes from the Scandinavian word for pot. But as people settled the treeless plains in eastern England, they developed a straw hive that could take the place of heavy log hives. According to historian Gene Kritsky, “The skep hive relied on easily obtained raw materials for hive construction and made movement of colonies a much easier process. This hive would enable beekeepers to increase the number of colonies that they managed and provide an easier method of swarm capture.”23 Skeps were lightweight and could be easily repaired with materials at hand. Bee skeps would have been in demand in the New World colonies just as they were in England. “Beekeepers needed to have two skeps for every colony: one skep for the colony and an empty one for its swarm,” explains Kritsky. “Thus, there was a demand for good skeps to replace ones lost during the previous year, or to increase the number of hives.”24 In fact, an anonymous saying from an American Bee Journal column indicates that beekeeping was a popular activity in the colonies: “There is scarcely a village in the country that might not readily keep as many hives of bees as there are dwelling houses in it.”25

  Right, 1.1. Skeps, Girth. How a skep is started. Originally illustrated in Herrod-Hempsell, 1930. Courtesy of Kritsky, April 2003. Making a skep was an art and a skill. The girth was the first step in the process. Many villages hired skeppists to meet the beekeeping needs of the community. John Eales was one of the first skeppists hired in colonial America. Given the unsettled economy during that time, he eventually died a pauper.

  Above, 1.2. Skeps. Typical bell-shaped skep hive with handle. Originally illustrated in Bagster (1838). Courtesy of Kritsky, May 2003. Skeps derived from the Scandinavian word for “pot,” which the straw hives resembled. But straw was more plentiful and easier to carry, especially when skeppists added handles.

  Left, 1.3. A thatch hackle tied over a skep hive; a milk pan used as a cover on a flat skep. Originally illustrated in Bagster (1838). Courtesy of Kritsky, May 2003. These illustrations indicate the versatility that beekeepers had with skeps, which represented a new technological advance in beekeeping.

  1.4. A skep beekeeper placing his hive on an eke. Originally illustrated in Bagster (1838). Courtesy of Kritsky, May 2003. An eke extends the hive, which provides more storage for a full hive of bees and discourages swarming.

  Some Pilgrims in Plymouth decided to settle in Connecticut. Although these pilgrims brought their hives, they found winters in Connecticut to be as difficult as they were at Plymouth. Furthermore, the Pequot Indians were more protective of their land, so the threat of attack was a constant worry.

  Colonists in other regions did not hive off in as organized a fashion as in Massachusetts. For example, Cecil Calvert, whose father was a member of the London Company, obtained a charter in 1632 for 10 million acres in Maryland. Although there were many English settlers, the region quickly absorbed a number of French Huguenots. In 1685, French Huguenots fled the Edict of Nantes and settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Although the French had maintained a consistent presence in the New World since the 1500s, they primarily had been to the west and north of the English colonies. The Huguenots who arrived on the East Coast brought sophisticated gardening and beekeeping skills.26 An old Clinton County bee master named Tommy Simcox recorded the following: “Early Huguenot [beekeepers] in the West Branch Valley [Pennsylvania] were wont to start upstream with their bees on flatboats every spring, traveling by night so as not to excite the bees and anchoring by flowery glades by day, each day giving their swarms a new and delicious pasturage. By the time they reached, ‘Les Fourchetts,’ or the Forks in what is now Keating, the weight of the honey lowered the boat to the water’s edge and the return journey began.”27 Simcox even provided the names of early Huguenot beekeepers in the region: Old Adam Kres, Jacob Carnes, Michel Hulin, Moise Godeshal, and Francos Bastress. These Huguenot beekeepers capitalized on the easy availability of bee trees in the region before William Penn organized Pennsylvania.

  Although the English were the most visible colonists, they were not the only ones settling on the Atlantic seaboard. In many ways, the Swedes were acclimated to the Pennsylvania colonial frontier.28 After Sweden passed the Forest Law of 1647, many Finnish foresters, who had been encouraged to harvest Swedish forests, were punished and imprisoned. One way out of prison was to go to America.29 The Finno-Swedes were “forest pioneers” and quickly applied their forestry methods in the New World. Historian Frederick Hahman reports that the Finno-Swedes brought German bees to the colonies as early as 1638.30 Pennsylvania offered plenty of white pine and hemlock forests, especially west of the Susquehanna River.31 In fact, according to Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups, “Indians complained to the Dutch that the New Sweden settler builds, plants on our lands without buying them or asking us.”32 The Indians also tended to associate the black bees with the bullets used in rifles, and thus remained suspicious of the honey bees for a long time, according to Hahman.

  Honey was very important to the Swedes, however, especially as the settlers extended into the Midland. They needed the quick, easy energy that honey supplied. Evidence suggests that the bees did very well in colonial Pennsylvania. Although the Swedish crops often failed, “Bees thrive and multiply exceedingly,” wrote a newly arrived Welshman; “The Sweeds often get great store of them in the Woods, where they are free for any Body.”33 Jordan and Kaups suggest that the Swedish colony succeeded in ways that the English did not, for the Swedish colonized the Pennsylvania forests with the least possible risk.

  The Dutch, who were more prepared than the Swedish colonists, first arrived in 1624 to establish New Netherlands.34 When first sending out an exploratory group, the Dutch East India Company considered bee skeps essential equipment. Later, when the West India Company was granted a charter to settle New Netherlands, it used flowery descriptions promising a New Canaan to entice the Dutch to leave the comfort and security of Holland. Unlike England, Holland was quite tolerant of religious differences, and many people were content to stay in Holland. The Pilgrims stayed for ten years, for instance, before sailing to Plymouth. In order to populate the New Amsterdam region, West India Company writers produced pamphlets in which, to quote historian Oliver Rink, “hyperbole knew few limits.”35 In fact, he quotes a Dutch writer who claimed that New Netherlands was “a maritime empire where milk and honey flowed.”

  New Netherlands was far from being a new Eden. In addition to the normal frontier challenges and hardships suffered by the English colonies, New Netherlands colonists could be intolerant of those who were not members of the Dutch Reformed Church. Blacks were imported as slaves, and Jews were treated poorly, although they did stay and eventually bought property. Quakers and Lutherans also were not welcomed. Only after official censure from authorities in Holland did Governor Peter Stuyvesant relax his control of the colony.

  But the colony did have honey. These settlers often kept bee skeps on the south side of their homes.36 One anonymous source quoted by Eva Crane stated, “You shall scarce see a house, but the Sout
h side is begirt with Hives of Bees, which increases after an incredible manner.”37 The south side of the house generally had a porch that extended the length of the house, and thus the bees would have been sheltered from the elements. Because the architecture suggests that bees were in close proximity to the houses, Dutch women probably kept bees just as they tended to the kitchen garden. If they didn’t have beehives, they might have had a Dutch oven, which was often called a beehive, for it “projected through the wall to the outside of the dwelling,” according to Firth Haring Fabend.38 When the English took over the New Netherlands in 1664, beekeeping was already established in this colony. It was a peaceful takeover because there had been a great deal of cultural interchange between the New Netherlands, Massachusetts, and Connecticut beforehand.

  Upon his father’s death in 1670, William Penn exchanged a debt of 16,000 pounds to King Charles II for 47 million acres of land in the New World. In 1681, a charter was granted, and he printed a pamphlet, “Some Brief Information on the Province or Region Called Pennsylvania Located in America.” He advertised land to colonists in three languages—Dutch, German, and French. His efforts paid off. In 1683, many German Protestant communities came to Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware. Exhausted by the Thirty Years’ War and religious persecution, many groups such as the Mennonites, Hutterites, and Quakers found religious freedom in Pennsylvania. The Lutherans and the Dutch Reformed Church came for economic reasons. These groups, arriving from all parts of Germany, were proficient beekeepers and honey hunters.

  A Mennonite Quaker from the Rhine Valley named Francis Daniel Pastorius crossed to Pennsylvania in 1683 aboard a “Noah’s Ark of religious faiths—Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Quakers.”39 Pastorius was not a beekeeper, but he carefully recorded all that he read in a bibliography called the “Bee Hive.” It contains approximately two thousand individual entries that Pastorius called “honey combs,” according to scholar Alfred Brophy. Pastorius was widely read and wanted his sons to be as well. Although the Bee Hive was intended for his family, it was and continues to represent the most comprehensive collection of Quaker and non-Quaker publications available in the colonies during the seventeenth century. Furthermore, according to Brophy, the Bee Hive served as a repository for the Quaker experience in England. By identifying a wide variety of Quaker writings in early Pennsylvania, Brophy argues that Pastorius “provided a substitute for memories of life in England” in his Bee Hive bibliography.40

  Further south of Pennsylvania, another experiment with colonization was happening. In 1670, the Virginia governor William Berkley, along with seven other investors including a Barbados planter named John Colleton, began a colony of rice and indigo plantations. As a colony, South Carolina offered cheap land. Slavery was considered the norm. Some prisoners settled in this region once they were released from prison in England. Whereas the beehive metaphor was constantly in the literature of sermons, diaries, and daily language in the New England colonies, it was nonexistent in the southern colonies, which tended to be founded later and by individuals rather than religious groups.

  Contrary to the image of the Puritan work ethic, New World colonists did have fun. Honey hunting became one of the first American pastimes. Forests in Sweden, England, and Germany were tightly controlled by the state, but colonists were free to find bee trees in America. Bees did extremely well in the New World forests, providing plenty of opportunities for hunting. Furthermore, colonists even appropriated the word bee to refer to a social gathering. Bee historian Rollin Moseley explains the evolution of the term: “Settlers along the Atlantic Coast were delighted to find wild bees quite plentiful. Frontiersmen soon noticed that the tiny bees always worked in groups and began to call any social gathering that combined work and pleasure a ‘bee.’” When communities organized new churches, social bees were held in order to compensate the preacher for his services: “All members of the community, whether they attended church or not, were solicited for gifts or work, clothing or food commodities,” according to Moseley.41

  Scholar Helen Adams Amerman suggests that the phrase “quilting bee” may have even originated in New Netherlands in 1660 when Dutch women gathered for the first social occasion of the season. Certainly, more preparation was taken by the hostess to make the affair fun and festive: “The [participants] could wear their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, an excuse they seldom had, and it was more elegant than corn-huskings or apple-peeling parties. The women sent out invitations…. This was one of the rare times that the ‘fore-room’ was used.”42 Although the term bee does not appear in newspapers until 1806, in Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York, he credited the social gatherings to Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant, who served as a director for the West India Company when the earlier director Willem Kieft proved to be an ineffective leader for the new colony. Distributing fiddles to the black musicians, Stuyvesant called for “joyous gatherings of the two sexes to dance and make merry. Now were instituted ‘quilting bees,’ and ‘husking bees,’ and other rural assemblages, where, under the inspiring influence of the fiddle, toil was enlivened by gayety and followed up by the dance.”43 When people wanted to quench their thirst, they drank mead, a honey-based drink. Thus the bee affected leisure as well as culinary and linguistic patterns during the early colonial years, even though as an organized, systematic hobby, American beekeeping languished behind other countries.

  1.5. Colonial husking bee, courtesy of the Library of Congress. No date recorded. H.W. Pierce drew this quilting bee, which was a festive occasion for colonial women. Men enjoyed “bees” to finish barns, harvest crops, or raise houses.

  Labor was a key issue in colonial America. If too many people were “idle drones,” then the business of colonizing (that is, the planting of) the New World would not get done. Although the English initially relied on indentured servants, many landowners quickly turned to the markets selling African slaves to resolve the labor issue, especially in the South. Recognizing that tobacco and rice would make the colonies economically viable, Virginia and South Carolina legalized slavery first.

  Dutch traders sold the first slave to Jamestown leaders in 1619. From then on, slave transactions were common between the Dutch and English colonists, until King Charles II ordered the English to take over New Netherlands in 1664 and added New York to his colonial properties. This takeover streamlined the slavery process. In 1698, the English Parliament ended the Royal Africa Company’s monopoly on the slave trade. That year, the number of African slaves brought into North America jumped from 5,000 to 45,000. Slaves from Angola, Senegal, Cameroon, and other bee-friendly climates were brought to various ports in the New World, such as South Carolina, New Netherlands, Massachusetts, New Orleans, and Virginia. Many Africans came from honey-producing regions in Africa, especially Angola.44 So many Angolan slaves arrived to his 8,000-acre plantation in Louisiana that Pierre LeMoyne Sieur d’Iberville named his plantation Angola in 1699.

  During the seventeenth century, Africa supplied the world’s largest amount of beeswax, although its value was ignored initially in tribal economies. Ironically, before the Portuguese arrived, many Africans threw beeswax away. But when Portugal conquered large areas in Africa to provide slaves for their sugar plantations in Brazil, the Africans adopted the word for candle for beeswax, kandir.45 The Portuguese needed beeswax for two main reasons: church candles and lost-wax molds, which were used to create religious objects and weapons.

  Lost-wax molds (cire-perdue) were used by many cultures during this time. In fact, Eva Crane divides her discussion of lost-wax casting among four civilizations: Mediterranean peoples dating from 3500 and 3000 B.C.; the Asian peoples from 2500 and 1700 B.C. (and it is still being used); the European cultures from 300 B.C. to the Renaissance; and the African peoples beginning in A.D. 800 to the 1700s. Crane describes the lost-wax mold process as follows: “A model was first sculpted in beeswax, and coated with pliable clay…. This was hardened by drying in the sun or by som
e other means. Next the whole was heated so that the wax of the model melted and was drained out or ‘lost’ through one or more vents…. To make the casting, molten metal—usually copper, bronze, brass, or gold—was poured in through an opening at the top of the mould and allowed to solidify, after which the mould was chipped away and discarded.”46 Crane further explains that large castings were done with lost-wax molds, and that ancient statues with complex intricate loops may be indicative of lost-wax molds. But this artistic skill died when slaves were brought to America. Although Crane does not speculate why, she does state the lost-wax mold process demanded a constant supply of beeswax. Such a supply was not readily found in the colonies.

  Although West Goree was the main export center for slaves and beeswax in Africa, beeswax came from all over West Africa, suggesting that the people from these regions were very skilled bee hunters, although Carl Seyffert, the historian who details early African beekeeping, admitted that very little is known about African beekeeping.47 In Gambia and Guinea, for instance, Seyffert states, “The absolutely massive abundance of bees, exquisite honey, and equal quality wax allowed a very lively trade to arise very early [in the colonial period].”48 The Masai tribe sometimes paid as much as two cows for a pot of honey.49 Angola was noted for having massive quantities of beeswax, so much so that a German ship physician comments on its abundant wax markets as early as 1611 and an Italian writer named Cavazzi reports that beeswax was sold in “masses” as late as 1687. Next to slaves, beeswax was the second-leading commodity in the region.50