Bees in America

by Tammy Horn

  There is no shortage of narratives about bees attending church. There are very good stories handed down from medieval times in Russia, England, Wales, Germany, and Ireland about the bees attacking sinful parishioners. However, one of the funniest incidents in America occurred on September 23, 1885, in Maryland. On that particular Sunday, the Wesley Chapel had some unexpected guests.

  The congregation of Wesley Chapel had tied up their teams, and settling into their seats on Sunday morning, when they found out that swarms of bees had taken possession of the church. They made the discovery so suddenly that they didn’t have a chance to escape before the bees began business with indefatigable industry and persistence.

  It is estimated that the proportion of stings to the second in the fifty seconds that it took the [words unclear] to make the distance from the front pew to the door was seven to one. Some of the slower movers failed to cover the space in less than a minute and a half.

  The heroic pastor waited long enough to announce that the church was untenable, and that no services would be held that day. He was the last one to escape, and bears a proportionate number of honorable wounds.87

  These nineteenth-century newspaper articles demonstrate a couple of important customs being defined in America: women worked with bees on a daily basis; people documented the ever-increasing conflicts between civilization and nature; and newspapers recorded a reporter’s healthy respect for the agrarian lifestyle and the humor that can be produced when it clashed with the ever-encroaching industrial one.

  Tall Tales

  Wallace Stegner once said that before the Civil War, the West was not a goal; it was a barrier. Not content to confine their dreams, Americans relied upon “brute force” to impose their agricultural ideals upon the arid landscape.88

  Americans had an unfortunate tendency to brag about these exploits in a genre known as the tall tale. The West cultivated tall tales. This genre was a peculiarly American invention, according to none other than Mark Twain. It is distinctive in two respects as far as story-telling traditions go: “the story must be told gravely about impossible circumstances, and it must finish with a well-timed pause, if it is to be successful.”89 As bees swarmed and settlers invaded the West, their encounters were bound to produce tall tales, the likes of which this country has not appreciated since.

  Nowhere were tall tales as prolific as they were in Texas. Bee swarms and railroads show a classic formula of agrarian versus industrial conflict. In 1882, a young man remembered hearing tales from a section foreman who had been “helping build the Texas and Pacific Railroad west … when construction reached the Brazos River. They built the bridge and then began working up a gorge, laying the track as they went. While blasting out the rocks in this gorge, they uncovered a bee cave.”90 The exposure to the sun causes the wax to melt. “It flowed like lava between the rails and over them.” In fact, as the story goes, workers had to sand the rails so the trains could get through.

  A whisky-drinking, curiosity-seeking entomologist, Gustaf Wilhelm Belfrage, who sent insects to the chief museums of the world, single-handedly made the Round Rock region in Texas “bee-cave mad.”91 Having found a ravine filled with millions of bees, he started a cedar brush fire. “For two days, the fire was kept burning, and bees continued to pour out with the smoke.”

  Predictably enough, on the third day, no bees came out. This change in fortune has been an ominous sign in stories for centuries. In this story, however, the end was ominous for the bee hunters, for the fire that they had set burned the wax and honey instead. In fact, “the sinkhole turned into a belching furnace. For four days and nights the fire raged. The heat calcined the whole hill…. Today, the place resembles a long-deserted lime kiln.”92

  As late as 1894, Gen. John R. Baylor relayed a bear hunter’s tale about a bee cave that “was worth a store full of coats … room after room was almost filled with long white curtains of the purest brush-blossom honey, some of them fifty feet high from top to bottom.”93

  But Jim Jones was the ultimate Texas honey hunter during the late nineteenth century. When launching an attack on a local bee cave, he hauled a pair of blacksmith bellows and rigged it with two hundred feet of hose to blow out the sulfur smoke. He employed another beekeeper to do the extracting, and both tied a honey extractor to a mesquite sled. Three hundred pounds of extracted honey—pure huajillo honey—was the net amount of one day’s work.94

  All good things must come to an end, and just as assuredly, Jim Jones had to die a bee hunter’s death. The Southern Pacific Railroad crossed the Pecos River, and the bridge that crossed it was the longest and highest in the West at that time. About a hundred feet beneath the railroad ties were hanging combs that were too snugly attached to the wooden ties to be jarred loose. There was nothing to do but build a rope ladder underneath the bridge to get to the honey. This Jones did, but his mistake was leaving his hungry, honey-eating hound on the railroad bridge. Because the weather was exceedingly hot, honey flowed at the slightest jarring movement—except, according to Dobie, “instead of dripping down, it dripped up the rope ladder. This can be understood only by remembering that the rope went up from the honey instead of down.”95 Thus, Jim’s hungry hound commenced to licking the honey as it dripped up the rope, only to lick so much he gnawed the rope bridge in two. Jim Jones in quick fashion dropped to the rocky floor of the Pecos Canyon, dying a bee hunter’s death.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, there were few recorded incidents about Indians and honey, suggesting that for them, the progress of America into the Plains was anything but funny. However, a first-generation American named Herman Lehmann, whose father immigrated to Texas with Prince Solms in 1842, wrote a captivity narrative about growing up with the Apaches. Herman was only eleven years old when the Lehmann farm was attacked by Mescelero Apache Indians in the 1870s. Herman was adopted by the Apache chief and became a warrior, taking great pride in attacking the Comanche Indians and buffalo soldiers. He also took pride in providing food for his fellow Apache brethren. When gathering honey on a raid, he was lowered into a bee cave: “This was a cloudy, damp day and the bees were out of humor, but I went naked in among them, filled my bag with nice new honey and comb, and hooted to be drawn up. This performance was repeated several times, and in this way we secured enough honey to last for a long time. There was plenty of honey left in the cave for the bees, too. Far back in the cave could be seen great clusters of comb honey, much of it black with age, and the storage must have been going on for years.”96

  Although Lehmann’s narrative suggests a benign relationship with the bees, Colorado honey hunters take the exact opposite approach. In Gridley, Colorado, the Herald described “Bee Rock,” located a half mile northwest of South Butte. The rock is about fifty by a hundred feet wide at the base and is from one to six feet wide on top. Nonetheless, a party of men decided to rob the hive, and the resulting newspaper article, “Storming a Bee Castle,” is a hilarious read of men using mining equipment in order to defeat the honey bees. Military language is used metaphorically (perhaps even satirically) throughout the article. “The men were supplied with powder, fuse, drills, bars, with which to assail the stronghold. Few of the invaders had nerve enough to cross the bridge but three of them got over and fired a blast. The result was a cloud of bees that made them retreat…. Next day, the assault was renewed, and after a lively battle of three hours, the bees were defeated. The dead bees filled three grain sacks to overflowing … the party found a solid mass of honey in the comb two and a half feet thick.”97 Words such as assault, retreat, battle, and defeated suggest that this particular bee hunt was done aggressively. The dead were even counted, and to the victors went the spoils of beeswax and honey.

  In a less place-specific article, writer Roger Welsch recorded a tall tale told by a pioneer Plainsman, which, judging from the content, may have been told during the late 1870s or early 1880s. The teller brags about taking a herd of bees from Nebraska to Texas on the hoof: “The next morning I made
a noise like sage brush in full bloom and as the bees came out of the hive, the consignee counted them and found that I hadn’t lost a single bee. We branded ‘em and notched their ears that very afternoon.”98

  1880 to1900

  Women were still making headway into the beekeeping community. Hunter MacCulloch published the first beekeeping book written for women in 1884: How I Made Money at Home, with the Incubator, Bees, Silkworms, Canaries, Chickens, and One Cow; by John’s Wife. Its inscription read: “Any woman will, if she can—any woman can, if she will.” John’s wife is introduced in this how-to manual. She provides an overview of bees, equipment, hives, honey, and wax production. It’s not exactly clear who John’s wife is, but she, as a character, does have a voice in the text: “For bee-culture is woman’s work. It brings her more than money: the open-air exercise that the care of bees calls for, will in nearly every case cure most of her bodily and mental ills.”99

  Even the Ladies Home Journal featured an article advising women to consider the “agreeable, healthful, and lucrative employment” to be found in beekeeping.100 Although the article acknowledges that men tend to be beekeepers, the writer suggests that “women ought to be better beekeepers than men, for they have, usually, a gentler, finer touch than men.” The article continues with a list of other qualities such as patience, confidence, and absence of fear. Interestingly enough, the article ends with a pragmatic note: “Though millions of pounds of honey are produced every year, yet honey is practically unknown to the great body of people. There are abandoned farms north, east, south, and west, and there are tons of honey on these farms running to waste; and at the same time, there are thousands of women: pinched by want, wearied by toil, who could earn, with the help of the bees, more than they earn now.”101 This writer addresses the plight of many women widowed or left by men to explore the West. The idea presented in the article is that beekeeping can take the place of the domestic ideal so widely promoted by magazines (including Ladies Home Journal) during the postwar years. Interestingly, the encouragement comes from within the female, not male, community.

  For instance, in 1896, Jenny Atchley encouraged people to begin beekeeping in Texas: “If you are going to make a beekeeper you must study your honey resources…. There is less competition in the bee business than in many other lines, and we ought to have our free, open unoccupied fields stocked with bees, that some of the many thousand tons of honey going to waste may be saved.”102

  During the 1880s, Lucinda Harrison was a large-scale commercial beekeeper in Illinois and published details of her bee dress.103 No less beneficial to women were settlement schools started in the 1880s to teach people subsistence arts. Pine Mountain and Hindman were both important for providing an education to rural mountain people, but also for preserving folk arts, such as keeping bee gums or tracking bees.

  The most poetic writer about bees was Emily Dickinson. Although her reserved stance, isolation, and reclusiveness pervade her other poems, I find the bee poems social, flirtatious, and very feminine: “Because a Bee may blameless hum / For Thee a Bee do I become / List even unto Me.”104

  Dickinson’s bee poems emphasize metamorphosis and a realization made after the possibility for freedom has passed. The epiphanies in these bee poems are more subtle than her other poems. For instance, in “Safe in their alabaster chambers,” the meek members of the Resurrection miss out on the “Light [that] laughs in the Breeze, / In her castle above them, / Babbles the bee in a stolid ear … / Ah! What sagacity perished here.”105 The “sting” in this poem is that the people miss out on the wisdom that comes from living outside the safe walls. Another poem begins with the line, “Could I but ride indefinite / As doth the Meadow Bee.” Like the previous poem, the writer shifts focus to bodies enclosed in dungeons: “So Captives deem / Who tight in Dungeons are.”106

  Dickinson’s bees are free whether they live in a hive, in a cell, or on a prairie. Even though the American prairies were thriving before bees arrived, Dickinson’s poem about their relationship is a good one:

  To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee

  One clover, and a bee,

  And revery.

  The revery alone will do,

  If bees are few.107

  More than one Native American would have disagreed with this poem’s content, for bees surely meant white settlers were imminent. But Dickinson is not to be faulted for never touching a Langstroth hive. She represents a consciousness of bees in the American feminine mind-set. She understood their work ethic and how laborious it was to produce something as sweet as a tiny drop of honey. Her bee poems are exactly that: drops of wisdom at a time often characterized by sentimentality and melodrama.

  Children also benefit from the emerging children’s literature market. Frank Stockton, the editor of the popular children’s magazine St. Nick, wrote The Bee-Man of Orn in 1887. This book perpetuated the notion of a bee hunter being old, ugly, and cranky, but of paramount importance to the industrial American society. In his journey to discover his identity, the Bee Man is not fooled by society’s conventions or temptations. Yet when a young baby is threatened by a dragon, the Bee Man uses his bees as a weapon. In this children’s tale, Stockton completely reverses the typical American hero: young, technologically advanced (with some type of weapon), and by the end of the tale, richer for his adventures. The Bee-Man of Orn ends up poor and remains a beekeeper, but a very happy one, as is his society around him.108

  For many Victorian American children, the nursery rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence,” while charming and memorable, did not match their existence. There were no kings or pies filled with blackbirds. But for many, the image of the queen “in the parlour / Eating bread and honey” was their first introduction to the delights of the liquid. She is a perfect counterpoint to the king, who is “in the counting house / Counting out his money.” Another proverb often featured in children’s books of this time taught them the importance of timing:

  A swarm of bees in May

  Is Worth a load of hay;

  A swarm of bees in June

  Is worth a silver spoon;

  A swarm of bees in July

  Is not worth a fly.

  Children were expected to understand the agrarian economy in which such a saying would have had meaning. In Alphabet of Country Scenes (1885), the rhyme book is notable for an illustration of the Langstroth hive instead of the more common bee skep in earlier children’s books.109

  Old World customs and superstitions about bees lingered in the public consciousness for at least two reasons: European immigration to America had not slowed, and newspapers recorded and thus perpetuated European superstitions about honey bees. As discussed earlier, two prevalent customs—that is, telling the bees of the death of the bee master and dressing hives in mourning cloth to prevent the bees from leaving—remained very popular in the nineteenth century. According to the article in an 1890 issue of the Courier-Journal, some people would even invite the bees to the funeral. The Courier-Journal also reminded its readers that bees must not be sold. “To sell them for money is considered a most unlucky proceeding,” the reporter warns, “but they may be bartered away and all will go right.”110 The article suggests trading a swarm for a pig or a bushel of corn. But anything less, and the bees’ “self-respect is touched, and they refuse to work for an owner who has bought them.”111

  A more ominous superstition was that bees foretold death in a family. Swarming on a piece of dead wood was considered a sign of impending death. The reporter offers the story of a wife who died in childbirth. The husband “accepted the blow philosophically because he said they had been warned of the event a fortnight before the confinement. The woman went to the garden and saw that their bees, in their act of swarming, had made choice of a dead hedge-stake for their settling place.”112 The reporter added a footnote to the story: “It is more than probable that the prediction brought about its own fulfillment.”

  Even though American popular culture was mythologiz
ing the bee hunter, tanging parties, and old European superstitions, significant inroads were being made in scientific beekeeping. During the 1880s, Kentucky beekeeper J. S. Reese developed the industry’s first bee escape, an aid in harvesting, and enjoyed high yields of honey by using migratory practices. According to Kentucky bee historian William Eaton, “They operated as many as 425 colonies for several years until foulbrood hit the area, wiping out the life’s earnings of several beekeepers almost overnight.”113 Foulbrood was (and remains) a serious threat to beekeepers.

  Many states continued to form beekeeping associations. The Kentucky State Beekeeper’s Association started in 1880, Iowa’s started in 1885, and North Carolina’s started in 1887. One of the first recorded instances of a young beekeeper was at the North American Beekeepers Society in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1881. Mary Nottnagle of Lexington, a seven-year-old, gave a recitation on honey bees, which was “warmly applauded.”114

  Mormons lamented that their state legislatures wouldn’t know a “honey bee from a yellow jacket” when it came to funding money for an inspector.115 The beekeepers lobbied and won out. By 1890, they had one—for the entire state of Utah.116

  Many lively debates also took place during this time. Many beekeepers, who used the bee magazines and conventions to discuss patent infringement laws, wrote to express support for Langstroth, who at that time was still engaged in a lawsuit over his hive design. From Selma, Texas, a progressive beekeeper named L. Stechelhausen wrote in 1888 that he was very much in favor of Langstroth, but the German partisan support for Dzierzon should be noted, for German beekeepers were very loyal to their country’s scientists. It took work on the part of German Americans such as Stechelhausen to convince newly arriving German beekeepers to adopt the Langstroth hive: