Bees in America

by Tammy Horn

  Part Three

  SWARMING WEST DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  Chapter 3

  BEFORE BEE SPACE 1801–1860

  The Indians with surprise found the mouldering trees of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial sweets, and nothing, I am told, can exceed the greedy relish with which they banquet for the first time upon this unbought luxury of the wilderness.

  —Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies

  American beekeeping history is generally divided into two periods: before and after Lorenzo Langstroth. Before Langstroth little was known about how the bee colony functioned. American beekeepers were at the mercy of two phenomena: a disease known as foulbrood and the bees’ natural instinct to swarm. Once Langstroth invented a hive that was compatible with how bees built wax combs, however, beekeepers could take better care of and profit from their hives. Because his discovery happened in 1851, a chronological division has been convenient for historians to use as a demarcation point when discussing bee history. The interracial and international social networks that existed between immigrants, pioneers, and Indians before Langstroth’s research has been overlooked because of how quickly the bee industry developed once the concept of bee space was invented.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, America seemed an unlikely place for the beekeeping innovations that would revolutionize the world by the end of the century. The smoker had yet to be invented, so many beekeepers used sulfur to kill bees before taking honey. Furthermore, American foulbrood destroyed many bee colonies. Although foulbrood was serious (the spores can remain dormant for eighty years), it was not the only threat to bees. The Boston Patriot published an account of wax moth for the first time in 1806.

  Although there are two kinds of wax moth, greater and lesser, this chapter refers to the greater wax moth, which has been a pest for a longer time. To paraphrase Roger Morse, wax moth larvae destroy honeycombs by boring through the wax in search of food.1 Strong colonies can withstand wax moth by evicting the larvae, but especially in the South, bees are almost always dealing with this pest. The German black bees, which could survive the colder temperatures in New England, were very susceptible to wax moth. Since a beekeeper could not check colonies for moths when bees were kept in straw skeps or bee gums, very little could be done to prevent the spread of moths. In the words of current Bee Culture editor Kim Flottum, “Wax moth is like a bad cold. [Contemporary] Beekeepers will always have to deal with it, but it is not especially disastrous if proper steps are taken beforehand to keep it from getting out of control.”2

  However, during the early nineteenth century, beekeepers had very little control because hives that they could open on a systematic basis had not been developed at this point. In fact, historian Wyatt Mangum suggests that wax moth might have been a problem much earlier as a result of the method used to ship bees across the Atlantic. Because straw skeps were placed in large crates, the chance that moths would be nested in the hives would have been not only possible, but probable.3 In any event, within two years of the 1806 Boston Patriot article, four-fifths of all apiaries in the Boston vicinity were abandoned.4

  Meanwhile, the beekeeping community in Europe was rapidly unlocking the secrets of the hive. Or so it seemed. A Swiss scientist, Francois Huber, designed an observation hive in spite of being blind. With the help of his wife and another assistant, Huber recorded his insights in his Letters, which was distributed among beekeepers everywhere, including America. Furthermore, Johann Dzierzon, a pastor in Silesia (now Poland), was also developing his own theories about beehive construction. Elaborate hives and skeps were constructed. Glass jars placed on the tops of skeps were really the first types of observation hives.5 Three-story octagonal hives—first designed in the seventeenth century—underwent major innovations in the nineteenth century so that they produced more honey. According to Gene Kritsky, beekeepers wanted to build hives that worked with the bees’ natural rhythms. So, using an eighteenth-century beekeeper named John Thorley as his source, Kritsky explains, “The use of the octagonal shape was thought to be the closest to a circle that could be produced from flat pieces of wood or glass, and this was the ideal shape to help the bees survive the winter, as they naturally clustered in a circular mass.”6

  3.1. Storifying using cylindrical skeps and a bell-shaped top skep. Originally illustrated in Bagster (1838). Courtesy of Kritsky, May 2003. Elaborate skep architecture was designed to facilitate the honey bees’ natural tendency to cluster in the winter and provide a place for bees to store extra honey. Neither invention was as effective as the Langstroth hive, which was more efficient in terms of honey storage.

  Furthermore, European beekeepers stayed in contact with one another more than beekeepers in America did. They had libraries, shared resources, and enjoyed better postal systems than Americans did before the 1800s. Because many beekeepers were clergymen, they had access to universities, scientists, and archives that American beekeepers could only dream about.

  When compared with Europe, American beekeeping was unsophisticated at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact, if the bees did survive American foulbrood and wax moth, American beekeepers would kill the weakest colonies at the end of a season, knowing the bees couldn’t survive the winters. The strong colonies were also destroyed because these would yield larger quantities of honey. Only the midweight colonies would be saved for the following year. This practice alone was enough to make American beekeepers seem cruel and primitive by European standards.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, however, America would become the leading influence on beekeeping throughout the world. “What had been needed all along,” explains Florence Naile, Lorenzo Langstroth’s biographer, “was a hive so built as to let bees live and work in their own way, to give their keeper ready access to the interior for inspection and care, and to permit the removal of surplus combs without waste of honey, disturbance of the colony, or injury of worker-bees.”7

  Once Langstroth developed a hive with moveable frames, beekeeping progressed in the following ways: beekeeping changed from a cottage industry to a profitable industry; bees benefited from better care; and large-scale commercial agriculture of tree crops and vegetables transformed America’s landscape and role as a political power. Furthermore, in a culture that was beginning to develop its own leisure habits, honey hunting remained a profitable sport in America.8 The same powerful media forces that educated emerging beekeepers also perpetuated the stereotype of the bee hunter and circulated instances of Old World folk practices such as tanging in the new country. Newspapers and books were much more common than in the previous centuries. These media forms perpetuated the sport of honey hunting, and European journals promoted beekeeping. Both activities emphasized powerful but contradictory values: independence and environmental sustainability on the one hand; scientific progress and efficiency on the other.

  The contradictory values associated with honey bees paralleled the values associated with westward migration. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson sealed the details on the Louisiana Purchase, opening up land that would eventually become fifteen states.9 The Northwest Ordinance brought peace to the Ohio Territory and established Jefferson’s policy regarding treaties with Native Americans—that is, “bribery, not war.” Jefferson’s policy was effective at maneuvering the Indians further west. Only one year later, Chief Keokuk was persuaded to sign over an additional 15 million acres, which included states from Missouri to Wisconsin.

  From this point on, the prairie lands were an open invitation to German, French, and Irish immigrants. These immigrants differed from those who participated in the initial colonization of the seventeenth century. Many were disillusioned with the revolutionary efforts in the European countries, displaced by industrialization, and frustrated with European land controls and high rents. In other words, immigration had less to do with religious freedom than it had for immigrants of the colonial period. These nineteenth-century immigrants primarily sought economic oppor
tunities, but they were still challenged by frontier conditions. So many economic, cultural, and physical benefits of honey and beeswax were still appreciated by these settlers, quite a number of whom came believing in the travel literature that promoted America as a paradise.

  Compared with the civil unrest gripping Europe, America was a paradise for people, slaves being the notable exception. But bees suffered. Although wax moth had plagued beekeepers since the time of Aristotle and Virgil, it was not native to the United States. Once wax moth appeared during the nineteenth century, the disease spread as quickly as American foulbrood had during the colonial period. Early records from this time provide a clue that overcrowding of hives could cause bee diseases. In Trumbull, Ohio, Jared P. Kirtland noted the intense competition between German beekeepers. By 1828, however, wax moth had ravaged their apiaries, and in 1831, every region in Ohio had been affected.10 Competition between beekeepers was a relatively new phenomenon because most people did not own enough land or resources to care for many hives in Europe. But when swarms were available, American farmers exploited bees as a natural resource as much as they did the land. Furthermore, Crane explains, “The large numbers of honey bee nests in trees contributed to the moth’s rapid spread.”11 Beekeepers were desperate. Within the time that the wax moth appeared until Langstroth invented his hive, at least six hundred patents for “new” hives were filed, many claiming resistance to wax moth.

  People relied on honey hunting, especially as the Appalachians, Midwest, and West developed. Sequestered from accessible trade routes, the Appalachian people developed a particular fondness for sourwood honey. The Native American tribes incorporated honey into their trading and celebrations. The English botanist Thomas Nuttall observed that the Shawnee Indians near Memphis, Tennessee, had venison and honey on New Year’s Day in 1819.12

  But bees had swarmed by natural dispersal further west than Tennessee. Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark found bees at the Kansas River in 1804, and English naturalist John Bradbury claimed to have seen them in Omaha in 1811. In one trade, Colonel J. W. Johnson, owner of a trading post in Burlington, Iowa, “purchased beeswax and tallow to the value of $141 from the Indians” in March 1809.13 Records suggest that after Colonel Harrod carried bees into Kentucky in the 1700s, the bees swarmed naturally and prolifically in the Midwest and Plains during the early 1800s. Still, the Plains were as formidable an environment to cross for honey bees as they were for white settlers. Although it is likely that bees would have moved west by their own dispersal, settlers streamlined the process by carrying bees with them in covered wagon into the western territories.

  Quite a few men became professional bee hunters during this time, and their exploits—recorded by James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Silas Turnbo, and Alphonso Wetmore—emphasize the importance of time and money. In these early nineteenth-century narratives, bee hunters were notoriously independent and had followed no one’s time schedules but their own—until the hunt began. Then a bee hunter’s reputation and career depended on how quickly he could find a bee tree. In these narratives, a good bee hunter could find a bee tree in thirty minutes or less. James Fenimore Cooper perpetuated the bee hunter type in both America and Europe with his wildly popular Leatherstocking Tales, especially The Prairie, which was published in 1827. The fictional characters were based on true explorers. According to historian Roger Welsch, “These [bee] men were often the most careful explorers of the new frontier country.”14

  Washington Irving’s Oklahoma bee hunter, always on the outskirts of civilization, always male, was a fashion faux pas: “A tall, lank fellow in homespun garb that hung loosely about his limbs, and a straw hat shaped not unlike a bee hive; a comrade, equally uncouth in garb, and without a hat, straddled along at his heels, with a long rifle on his shoulders.”15 Frontier beekeepers lived off the land, and thus the rifle was the new element to the typical portrait of the beekeeper. Although he was perfectly capable of working with wild bees, the beekeeper needed more protection on the Oklahoma frontier.

  In the lesser-known region of Arkansas, Silas Turnbo recorded at least seven stories about bee hunting in Chronicles of White River, several focusing on a local legend named Bill Clark in the Ozark region. Bee hunter Clark had a fine reputation for settling clients’ honey and wax requests and kept all of his promises, but he did it on his schedule. Sometimes several months would pass before the honey showed up on a doorstep. Turnbo also included stories of unethical bee hunters, giving the stereotype an edge that had not appeared in the genre before.16 In Turnbo’s chronicles, unscrupulous bee hunters—such as those who would steal or chop down their neighbor’s bee trees—were part of the reality of frontier ethics. But Turnbo also included a method describing how hunters would drink honey out of a deer leg: “The usual way of making the case was to take the hair off the hide and thoroughly tan it and sew it all up into a sack except the end of one leg which was left open. Sometimes though the hide was formed into a case without removing the hair. When the case contained honey and a hunter become hungry for a drink of honey, he would suck it from the aperture in the leg.”17 A successful hunt was judged by how many deerskins were filled with honey. Turnbo had a fastidious eye for details, and his chronicles provide valuable information to contemporary audiences wanting to know the nitty-gritty details of an old-fashioned honey-hunting party.

  While Turnbo wrote mainly about Arkansas, Washington Irving wrote about Oklahoma as he traveled with Charles Joseph Latrobe’s 1832 expedition. Compared with Turnbo, Irving idealized “The Honey Camp” and “The Bee Hunt” in A Tour on the Prairies (1835), glamorizing the Great Plains as a place where one could live off the land.

  The honey camp is described as a “wild bandit or Robin Hood scene … in a beautiful open forest, traversed by a running stream, where booths of bark and branches, and tents of blankets.” The Creole cook on the tour suggests a diverse community existing on the Plains: “Beatty brought in a couple of wild turkeys; the spits were laden, and the campkettle crammed with meat; and, to crown our luxuries, a basin filled with great flakes of delicious honey, the spoils of a plundered bee-tree, was given us by one of the rangers.”18 Not content to merely describe the bee camp and its cook, Irving also describes a bee hunt. Noting how Indians have reacted to the abundance of bee trees, Irving states: “It is surprising in what countless swarms the bees have overspread the Far West within but a moderate number of years. The Indians [the Osage and Pawnee were in Oklahoma] consider them the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man; and say that, in proportion as the bee advances, the Indian and the buffalo retire.”

  Irving provided one of the fullest discussions about how Native Americans included honey into their diet and trading patterns: “The Indians with surprise found the mouldering trees of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial sweets, and nothing, I am told, can exceed the greedy relish with which they banquet for the first time upon this unbought luxury of the wilderness.”19 The Indians were already well-established buyers and traders when discussing weapons and food; Irving’s compliment acknowledged the Indians’ ready acceptance into their “banquet.”

  As if to accentuate the juxtaposition between the orderly bee colony and the Oklahoma frontier, Irving describes the bees as urban professionals, unaware of the impending downturn in their forest marketplace: “The jarring blows of the axe seemed to have no effect in alarming or disturbing this most industrious community. They continued to ply at their usual occupations, some arriving full freighted into port, others sallying forth on new expeditions, like so many merchantmen in a money-making metropolis, little suspicious of impending bankruptcy and downfall.”20 Irving’s parallel between the businesslike bee community and an emerging market class was one of the finer additions since bee literature started with Virgil’s Georgics. Irving added the element of money, linking it to honey, and thus producing a very capitalistic—and very American—spin on the bee swarm and the bee hunter.

  No l
ess of a frontiersman than Davy Crockett was pleased to find that in Texas “there were bees and honey a-plenty” in 1836. A bee hunter named Gideon Lincecum wandered through the Texas Republic in 1835:

  I lived plentifully all the while…. Every time I found honey I would have a feast of the first order. I could kill venison any time, and to broil the back-straps of a deer on the coals, dip the point of the done meat into the honey, and then seize it in your teeth and saw it off with your knife is the best and most pleasant way to eat it. I have often thought that there could be no other preparation of food for man that is so suitable, so agreeable, and so exactly suited to his constitutional requirements.21

  Of these honey hunters, the legendary Tom Owen stood out, as much for what he didn’t do as what he could do. He did not lure bees to a flour-covered plate and then follow them the way many of his peers did. This process, which is still used in some parts today, is called “coursing” a bee, and because the bee is covered with flour, a hunter can easily follow it back to the colony. Instead, Tom Owen depended entirely on eyesight to find trees over a mile away. Owen would say, “These clever little beasts have their set ways. One has only to watch the air current. When they go out foraging they always fly against the wind, then the breeze helps them to carry home their heavy load.”22

  From Texas to Iowa, bee hunters on the plains were a marked contrast to the calm, quiet monks or subservient peasants who were generally associated with European beekeeping, subjected to rigid laws and taxation, and confined to unbending social classes and economic opportunities. Too, since printing presses had become mechanized, the bee hunter became a type that was marketed just as the Indian was: the man pushing the boundaries of the frontier, one foot in the wild, one foot in civilization, independent, isolated, and loving only the order of the hive. In early nineteenth-century narratives, the bee hunter moved on the margins of a society, searching for a liquid gold rather than cities of gold. In the increasingly secular American West, that was as close as the bee hunter would come to a church.