Bees in America

by Tammy Horn

  Women weren’t the only ones going to California. By 1878, California had abundant sources of nectar and the bees to harvest them. This triggered another gold rush, except this time the gold was honey. But beekeepers lost their stakes just as the forty-niners did if they weren’t mindful of their circumstances. An unfortunate example of a beekeeper who went west with dreams and ambitions was Rufus Morgan.

  A photographer and beekeeper in North Carolina, Morgan was convinced that he could make a healthy profit in California. He left his pregnant wife Mary Clark Morgan behind while he went to establish a place in San Diego. Upon arriving, he struck up a business relationship with successful bank director Ephraim W. Morse, in which profit and expenses were to be shared equally if Morgan would take charge of Glen Oak Apiary. In a series of fifty-five letters to Mary, we see Morgan become more realistic about the honey conditions and his business relationship with Morse. Of course, Morgan also expresses his longing to be reunited with his family and his dreams of having them in California.

  The letters from January 1879 reflect Morgan’s initial optimism: “The honey business is a big thing here, bigger than I had any idea of—I know in five years from now I will be making $5000 pr year!—Fortunes are made at it here & all are doing well at it. Plain farmers talk of raising $1500 to $2000 worth of honey just as we talk of making 8 & 10 bales of cotton” [emphasis Morgan’s]. But letters dated in February suggest that Morgan’s dreams would be in trouble, for there was a “dearth of pollen,” and in a letter dated March 12, 1879, he admits that “everything is higher here than there.” On March 28, “Everyone has the blues” because there had not been any rain.

  By May 1, 1879, Morgan verifies that the weather did not cooperate with his plans, but he and Morse were negotiating the purchase of three more apiaries. Still, he was running up debt with Morse and not bringing in as much money as he thought. Morgan began to keep chickens and make wooden decorations for sale as he waited for a turn in fortune. In a letter that contained an ominous prediction, Morgan happily predicts, “If [Morse] does not die, I will have all the capital I want.”66

  Unfortunately, a year later Morgan died unexpectedly after eating a meal of poisonous mushrooms. His dreams of becoming another Samuel Harbison never materialized. In fact, according to transcribers Massengill and Tompkins, Morgan’s partner Morse sent a letter to Morgan’s wife informing her that Morgan owed him $125 dollars and offered virtually nothing in the way of compensation. Morse did return Morgan’s earthy possessions—a gold watch, some gold studs, some pressed ferns, and a few books—but offered very little in the way of condolences. Barbara Newton provides several clues to Morse’s financial circumstances, which were precarious due to the drought—Morse had lost several thousand dollars by that point. Morgan died in April 1880, so Morse had to find someone to take over the apiaries quickly because the colonies were growing, and nectar would soon be available. It is possible that he did not have time for the social niceties which sad occasions demand. Fortunately, Morse stayed in beekeeping. He unified beekeepers in terms of marketing and shipping honey overseas because the Central Pacific railroad had a monopoly in the region and charged exorbitant shipping rates.67

  Morgan was not the only person to migrate from the South. When Union troops deserted the South in 1877, Exodusters (former slaves) left for Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois. As already mentioned, one Exoduster, John Hammon, stayed in Hamilton, Illinois, to work in Charles Dadant’s fledgling bee supply industry. Too, a small contingent of blacks went to Utah with the Mormons, often serving as cooks and hired hands to the families that had left the South. Thus, Reconstruction was a profound time for American beekeepers who, along with the larger society, often rebuilt new lives in new regions with new ethnic groups.

  Inventions

  The four major inventions transforming beekeeping from a sideline interest to an industry appeared within a fifteen-year span: the moveable frame hive (1851), the wax comb foundation (1857), the centrifugal honey extractor (1865), and the bellows smoker (1873). Langstroth’s moveable frame hive was the prototype for many new hives in America, but they all adhered to the same principle of bee space.

  In moveable frame hives, bees build their comb on sheets of foundation—a thin sheet of beeswax embossed with hexagonal cell walls—placed vertically in the middle of a frame. This foundation guides the bees when they build their cells and respects bee space between frames and the hive body. Johannes Mehring invented a machine that would manufacture embossed wax foundations in 1857. Using Mehring’s ideas, A. I. Root developed a similar roller press in 1876. His first customer was Christian Diehnelt.68 Eric Nelson sums up, “Further development of wax foundation has been a process of refinement rather than innovation.”69

  4.7. Johannes Mehring. Courtesy of Dadant Company. This man invented the comb wax foundation maker, the second invention needed for a commercial beekeeping industry.

  Next came the extractor, which took honey from the wax foundation sheets. Before the extractor, people had no alternative but to remove honey by “cutting the comb from the frames, crushing it, and straining the honey from the wax. This was both time consuming and costly,” according to Nelson.70 Using the idea of centrifugal force, Austrian Fransesco de Hruschka created an extractor. After removing the wax cell cappings from a frame of honey, he placed the frame in a basket located in a drum-like canister. Centrifugal force pulls the honey out of the cells when the basket is turned, and honey collects at the bottom of the canister.

  4.8. Two workers pressing comb foundation. Courtesy of Bee Culture.

  In Boston, Massachusetts, H. O. Peabody created an extractor that had baskets balanced on a pivot arm in 1870. When T. W. Cowan improved on this by making the baskets automatically reversible so the frames did not need to be turned by hand, the stage was set for a less labor-intensive chore than honey extraction had been initially. “The extractor made liquid honey available on a commercial scale previously unknown,” according to Nelson. “However, many people refused to believe that it was pure honey, and several years passed before it was accepted by the public.”71

  In 1873, Moses Quinby improved the smoker by adding bellows to a firebox. Before, beekeepers had difficulty keeping the smokers working. Quinby’s model increased the airflow in the firebox, greatly im proving the life of the coals inside. With the bellows attached, however, the smoker could be used with more control on the beekeeper’s part. “At last, the fundamental principle was found,” writes Pellet. “Once well fired, it [the smoker] worked beautifully, but it went out when laid aside.”72 Having made the invention at the end of his life, Quinby never tried to patent it. He died shortly thereafter. These four inventions—essentially unchanged—remain the pillars that support the beekeeping industry, although modifications have been made through the years.

  4.9. Major Fransesco de Hruschka. Courtesy of Dadant Company. This man invented the honey extractor. The invention was the third step in forming a modern bee industry. A popular beekeepers legend is that Hruschka saw his child swinging a basket over his head and that action inspired him to develop a similar basket to hold honey frames.

  In addition to these discoveries, queen rearing had largely been handled by European scientists until the 1870s. The major principle concerning queen rearing—that is, that worker bees can produce queens from young larvae originally in worker cells—had been discovered as early as 1568 by Michael Jacobs, but his observations had been met with disapproval.73 According to Harry Laidlaw Jr., “The discovery that larvae in worker cells can develop into queens is as important to queen rearing as Langstroth’s recognition of the bee space is to beekeeping as a whole.”74

  4.10. Honey extractor. Courtesy of Bee Culture. The extractor uses centrifugal force. The frames are placed in baskets and then turned with the crank. Honey slides down the walls and collects at the bottom. A valve opens to let the honey drain into bottles.

  Nineteenth-century European scientists Francois Huber, Johann Dzierzon, Miss Jur
ine, Karl von Siebold, and Rudolph Leuckart were able to prove Jacobs’s assertions, and their discoveries began to encourage those who wanted to study bee genetics. Gregor Mendel’s work with sweet peas was just beginning to unlock the secrets of inheritance. But many of the early experiments with queen bees were hampered by beliefs that queens mated in the hive.

  Still, when American beekeepers such as Langstroth, Samuel Wagner, and Moses Quinby learned of the Italian bees, they wanted the subspecies to be available. Importing Italian queens fueled interest in queen rearing and the search for the perfect bee. Although early experiments in queen rearing were not successful, a beekeeper named G. M. Doolittle “showed great ingenuity in combining the advantages of numerous meth ods advocated by others into a workable system.”75 He made artificial cell cups and transferred young worker larvae into them. By placing a small amount of royal jelly in these cups (known as “grafting”), Doolittle increased the chances that the cups would be accepted by the bees. Using a suggestion by A. I. Root, Doolittle dipped the cells in warm wax and did his grafting in a warm room. Again, he met with success. Finally, he helped develop a queenright cell builder colonies and cell finisher colonies, which have become standard in the beekeeping industry.76

  4.11 Quinby smoker. Courtesy of Wyatt Mangum. By attaching a bellows system to a smoker, Quinby invented a fourth tool for commercial beekeeping.

  Rolling on the River

  Migratory beekeeping became possible during the 1870s because trade routes suspended during the war were reestablished, some by unconventional methods. C. O. Perrine wanted to have migratory beekeeping on the Mississippi River. He invested in a fleet of barges, hired fifteen men, and collected one thousand colonies of bees. Even by today’s standards, that dream would have seemed ambitious, but Perrine liked large dreams. “He had visions of shipping the honey direct to Europe, as he was exporting extensively at the time.”77

  His dream did not make it through the season. No one connected with the enterprise had a clear sense of honey flows and blooming seasons. When the barge should have anchored near some banks for a week or two, the captain would move in one or two days. Furthermore, so many machinery problems occurred so often that Perrine gave up on the barges and loaded the hives on a steamer. The operation made it as far north as St. Paul, Minnesota, and the bees were taken south again, to winter on a bank in Calhoun County, Illinois. When yellow fever subsided in New Orleans, Louisiana, the bees finally floated home.

  Perrine suffered heavy losses, as much from hives falling in the river as from bees flying away from his barges, to say nothing of poor honey production. His last words on floating apiaries were spoken at the North American Beekeeper’s Association, when he was reported to have advised beekeepers: “Keep as far as possible from large bodies of water.”78

  Later, O. O. Poppleton transferred his business from Iowa to the Indian River region in central Florida. Because he chose hives that were not top-heavy, Poppleton could move his hives up and down the river at will, depending on the bloom season, proving migratory beekeeping could be done on waterways.

  During this time, railroads were the best choice for migratory beekeepers. Although railmen initially resisted the thought of carrying bees, many beekeepers profited from the large, open cars, and they were able to get two seasons from their bees. A particularly colorful character is a man named Migratory Graham, who at one time had three thousand colonies in California. He produced 120 tons of honey in one season, but he was perpetually in trouble because of the disease laws he violated with his large colonies.

  Still, a horse and wagon could carry bees just as well, and in 1872, Gen. J. B. Allen brought bees from San Diego, California, to Tucson, Arizona. On July 27, 1872, the Arizona Citizen happily predicted: “The bees brought here from California by Gen. J. B. Allen are doing very well. They swarmed last week and were hived without other than ordinary labor. We may soon expect to have fresh honey added to our list of local products and bills of fare.”79 In an ironic twist of fate, then, Allen reversed the westward migration of bees by taking bees east. Thirty years later, the Arizona Daily Star reported that the bees were still doing well, “both domestic and those swarming in the mountains, … by which the entire territory and part of New Mexico and Sonora were seeded.”80

  By 1879, significant progress had been made by farmers addressing soil erosion. Clover, once thought to be a useless weed, became a lifeline for many beekeepers. In Kentucky, E. E. Barton introduced sweet clover into the Pendleton County region. Soil erosion had been a serious problem in Kentucky since the Civil War, and Barton wanted to introduce clover to help combat the problem. Of the twenty-five or more species of clover (melilotus), Pellett only mentions two biennial clovers—one with white blossoms and one with yellow—and he was not specific about which one Barton used.

  The Anti-Bee Monopolist

  With all these advances in bee inventions and social conventions, it was bound to happen that there would be a cultural backlash from the old honey hunters. Pennsylvania, long a haven for bees, was one of the first states to organize beekeeping associations. The invention of the Langstroth hive changed the ancient art of honey hunting, however, and even though the majority of beekeepers applauded Langstroth’s discovery, a few die-hard honey hunters were ready to register their complaints.

  In a letter written to the Pittsburgh Leader, an anti-bee monopolist wrote the following: “I can remember the day when any good, enterprising man, with half an eye, could always have half a dozen bee courses laid out, and at least a tree or two of honey for barter to a neighbor whenever he needed a bushel of potatoes or a side of bacon for his family. In those days, a ‘bee course’ was legal tender, almost.”81 The anti-bee monopolist continued his tirade by explaining how the barter system worked: “Why, just think of it! I have traded a bee course for a Bible, for a load of pumpkins, for a colt, for a couple of shoats and even for store goods, taking an order as good as the cash in payment.”82

  The anti-bee monopolist also talked about the services that were bartered for bee courses:

  I have seen the day when, if I wanted a couple of days’ plowing done, I could go to any man of family in the township and tell him I had a good bee course, could give him the lines sure, and get my plowing done as handsome as though I owned all the cattle in the country. Everything’s changed…. Everybody wants to speculate and monopolize things nowadays, so that a quiet man can’t get along without pretty hard rubbing sometimes. You can’t even take out a hound or two for a little harmless sport any more without being hauled up for trespass for somehow or another somebody’s bound to inform on you. But of course, bee hunting suffers like everything else that was originally intended for man’s benefit.

  The Pittsburgh Leader published the old bee-hunter’s letter but reserved the right to disagree with his antimonopolist stance, claiming instead to think that conventions are good for beekeepers, “but as the bee hunter treats the subject rather originally, he is permitted to have his say.”83

  Old World Customs in an Industrial Culture

  Even as beekeeping was becoming increasingly more commercialized, more newspapers were printing accounts of wild swarms and tanging, which suggested a lingering curiosity and respect for the insect, even though the country was becoming more secular and more industrialized. In Alabama, for instance, the Somerville Falcon reported a rather “curious circumstance.” It was rather warm and sunshiny and a young lady sat in the parlor playing the piano, with all the windows thrown open, when a swarm of bees, attracted by the music, entered a window and settled on the piano.84

  In New York, a state commonly associated with the city, a longer article, titled “Hiving Honey Bees: The Remarkable Conduct of Some Farmers’ Boys and Girls Explained,” contains two good honey-hunting stories. The article begins with a description of a “bare-headed woman, with hair streaming in the wind, thumping a tin pan” and followed by young men and women, clanging on pots and pans. The city folk were startled. The group did n
ot cry out or shout, but kept looking up, regardless of the brambles, briers, or marshy places.

  The article contains an explanation for tanging: The tin-pan party was found grouped about a tree. A sturdy youngster was sawing off a branch on which the bees had settled in a big brown cluster. As he sawed, a young man explained, “When they’re swarming … they will light on the first tree they meet with in their flight as soon as they hear the rattle and clatter of the tin pans.”85

  The writer continues: as the group saunters home with bees in tow, another story gets told about an Ontario & Western railroad man staying at Squire Knox’s house. While in the middle of dinner, “one of the help, a deaf and dumb man, made a sign to the Squire, and grabbing a tin pan, ran out of the house. The Squire grabbed up the tin cover of a kettle, and then everyone grabbed up all the tin utensils they could find, and rushed after the Squire, each one beating on his tin.”86 The railroad man was convinced his host and hostesses were crazy, especially since Squire Knox, who came home empty-handed, didn’t explain the process of tanging.

  In this newspaper article, the New York writer emphasized a classic conflict between agrarian and city folk. The rural folk ignored gender-defined boundaries without even realizing it or feeling the need to communicate such an old European tradition. As such, they risked being labeled crazy by outsiders.

  They were not bothered. Their love of bees was such that they stopped at nothing to try to coax the bees home. Furthermore, the railroad man, associated with progress and civilization, didn’t look very sophisticated because he was also an outsider, so separated from the environment that he could not appreciate the bees.