Bees in America

by Tammy Horn

  Although the novel is filtered through Lily’s eyes, Kidd positions black women in the beekeeping community, which has not been done since Frank Pellett was writing about the South in the 1920s. Kidd extends a pastoral tradition begun with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in the 1930s. Kidd reminds her readers of the fundamental promise that the American Dream is open to everyone, including black women, and the land will provide if one is willing to learn its complexities.

  Through the course of writing this book, I have come to agree with G. H. Cale, writing in 1943, that honey bees and their keepers have become stepchildren in United States agriculture. The twentieth century, with its emphasis on industry and technology, created a support system between farmers, extension specialists, and the federal government to respond to agricultural emergencies. But beekeepers still seem to be on the margins of this infrastructure. We need to strengthen those systems as our country enters a new millennium. We cannot continue to take for granted honey bees or their keepers.

  We also need to rethink our long-held associations between bees and people—specifically poor people. The link between drones and the poor has been weakening since the 1900s, but if America is to continue to be a model hive, we have to take better care of our workers in the new millennium by offering better insurance, better retirement, flexible schedules, and job security. As a society, America can do better when it comes to offering good working conditions, clearer communication patterns, and more equitable power distributions for its workers. How do I know this? Nineteenth-century business owners Charles Dadant and A. I. Root established businesses in which workers were given progressive benefits; both businesses still influence the industry in 2004. In the twentieth century, Walter Kelley bequeathed his company to his employees. We can take our cue from beekeepers, who know quite well the importance of proper management of workers.

  My last argument in this book has been that globalization was not just a twentieth-century political term, but rather a phenomenon that has happened among beekeepers in this country for four centuries. This book has been a study in analyzing how this little insect pulls together diverse societies within our borders. In their love for the bee, American beekeepers and honey hunters have crossed—and I predict will continue to cross—racial, gender, ethnic, religious, and education differences that can separate other groups. As import trade continues to become a factor in domestic honey trade and the 1922 Honey Bee Restriction Act has been relaxed, I remain fascinated by the interactions between bees and beekeepers.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Charles Hogue, “Cultural Entomology,” 192. Hogue advocates more research be done to further an emerging and valid field of knowledge he calls “cultural entomology.” The first colloquium on cultural entomology took place at the Seventeenth International Congress of Entomology in Hamburg in 1984.

  2. Gene Kritsky, “Castle Beekeeping,” 26.

  3. Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie: Or a Treatise Concerning Bees and the Due Ordering of Them (1609). For a discussion about gender politics that existed before Butler’s book was published, see Jeffrey Merrick, “Royal Bees.” He argues that “the hive was not a symbol of female authority to many of the French regents such as Catherine de Medici, Marie de Medici, Anne of Austria or Elizabeth I” (15).

  4. Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England, 54. Sharpe provides further information about the spiritual nature of Butler’s writings, which instructed all members of the commonwealth to pay tithes. Sharpe argues that subsequent writings about honey bees became more secular after the 1630s.

  5. Frederick Prete, “Can Females Rule the Hive?” 125. Prete’s wonderful article traces British beekeeping texts and their audiences until the eighteenth century.

  6. Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 95.

  7. Mark Kishlansky, Monarchy Transformed, 29.

  8. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 39.

  9. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model.” I’m grateful to Kupperman for this thoroughly researched article on bees and the social model that the English transferred to the colonies.

  10. Tom Webster, interview with the author, April 2, 2004.

  11. Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model,” 273.

  12. Ibid., 286.

  13. Timothy Raylor, “Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees,” 96.

  14. Ibid., 117. Incidentally, Hartlib’s best friend was a victim of the famine in 1840s. He literally starved to death.

  15. Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model,” 288.

  16. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Death and Apathy.”

  17. Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model,” 273.

  18. E. W. Teale, “Knothole Cavern.”

  Chapter 1. Bees and New World Colonialism

  1. George Peckham, “A True Report of the Late Discoveries,” in Envisioning America, 64.

  2. The English were not the first to bring cattle to North America. The Spanish had imported cattle into the area that is now Texas in the 1500s. No record exists that they tried to bring honey bees, although they did profit from the stingless bee that produces honey in Mexico. This variety is different from the Apis mellifera, however.

  3. Eva Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. The Sea Venture was the flagship of the Virginia Company of London, and when the English decided to take possession of the Bermudas, other colonists arrived, including Robert Rich. Crane provides documentation of a letter that Rich wrote to his brother, Nathaniel, dated May 25, 1617, from the Bermudas: “The bees that you send doe prosper very well” (358). Crane also provides a footnote that the wreck of the Sea Venture provided the theme for William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

  4. Kupperman, “Death and Apathy,” 24.

  5. Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model,” 278.

  6. Ibid., 277. In her article “Death and Apathy in Early Jamestown,” Kupperman records that there was the belief that scurvy “attacks only the soft and lazy, and there was, therefore, a moral element in contracting the disease” (34). She doesn’t analyze the reasons for this moral judgment, but I think she sets the foundation for an argument that the English were preconditioned to associate inactivity with dronelike behavior.

  7. Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 358–59. Crane lists the captains and names of four ships from the Virginia Company that had transported the items on November 21, 1621: John Huddleston of the Bona Nova, Thomas Smith of the Hopewell, Danielle Gale (or Gate) of the Darling, and Captain Thomas Jones of the Discovery.

  8. Kupperman, “Death and Apathy,” 36.

  9. Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model,” 283.

  10. William Sachs, “Business of Colonization,” 6.

  11. Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model,” 281.

  12. Ibid., 284.

  13. William Wood, New England’s Prospect, 68:54.

  14. Sachs, “Business of Colonization,” 9.

  15. Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model,” 282.

  16. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives, 37; Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies.

  17. David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America, 63.

  18. Kupperman, “Beehive as a Model,” 283.

  19. Sachs, “Business of Colonization,” 11.

  20. Ibid., 13.

  21. John Goodwin, The Pilgrim Republic, 510–12. Blackstone, who also signed his name Blaxton, was an eccentric hermit who planted a large orchard in the area that eventually became the Boston Common. The type of apple is not known, except that writers referred to it as being a “yellow sweeting.” Later in life, after he had married and was coaxed back into preaching, Blackstone would toss golden apples to children in attendance. This trick and the fact that Blackstone would ride to sermons (which often were held underneath a tree) on a bull in lieu of a horse would bring spectators to his church.

  22. Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 303.

 
23. Gene Kritsky, “Advances in Early Beekeeping,” 311.

  24. Ibid.

  25. “Sense and Nonsense: From ABJ 1866.”

  26. An interesting fact is that Lorenzo Langstroth, who revolutionized beekeeping, had ancestors who were part of this movement.

  27. Frederick Hahman, “A History of Bee Culture in Pennsylvania,” 409.

  28. Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups, American Backwoods Frontier. Jordan and Kaups write about the emerging Finnish immigrants. As the Finns migrated to Sweden, they gradually encountered problems. Too much woodland and game were destroyed by the newcomers, too much summer pasture and wild meadow were lost by the valley folk, and too much rye from the prolific burned clearings flooded the markets. The resulting conflict, as well as news of another frontier where their shifting cultivation could be freely practiced, brought some Finns to colonial America.

  The available evidence, though fragmentary, strongly suggests that the proportion of Finns in the population of New Sweden increased steadily after the mid-1640s. At first the Finnish migration was forced, involving deportations for crimes committed in Sweden, but the early exiles sent back glowing reports to their kinfolk. By the late 1640s, hundreds of Finns had petitioned for the right to emigrate to New Sweden. They began flocking to the Delaware Valley in the early 1650s, and “America fever” raged in the Finnish of Scandinavia. By the end of Swedish rule, at least one-third of the Delaware Valley population was Finnish.

  29. John Wuorinen, The Finns on the Delaware.

  30. Hahman, “A History of Bee Culture in Pennsylvania,” 409. Hahman cites a clipping published in the Altoona Tribune, owned and edited by an Hon. Henry W. Shoemaker of McElhaton, Clinton County, Pennsylvania.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Jordan and Kaups, American Backwoods Frontier, 59.

  33. Ibid., 232.

  34. Gerald Francis De Jong, Dutch in America, 5. De Jong argues that “it was in the field of commerce that the Dutch distinguished themselves during the seventeenth century. They founded colonies in Brazil, the West Indies, North America, Africa, Ceylon, the Levant, Russia, Japan, and especially the Baltic.”

  35. Oliver Rink, Holland on the Hudson, 171.

  36. See P. W. Bidwell, History of Northern Agriculture; Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting; Bernie Hayes, “The Honey Bee and Napolean Bonaparte.”

  37. Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 304.

  38. Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies.

  39. Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America, 25.

  40. Alfred Brophy, “Quaker Bibliographic World,” 245. An aside: Pastorius was one of four men who signed the 1688 “Germantown Protest,” which was a formal protest of slavery in Pennsylvania. Even though all four men were highly regarded, their effort did little good. It was another hundred years before Pennsylvania would abolish slavery.

  41. Rollin Moseley, “Why the Quilting ‘Bee,’” Bee Culture 112, no. 12 (1984).

  42. Helen Adams Amerman, “Quilting Bee in New Amsterdam,” 5.

  43. Washington Irving, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, 353.

  44. Although early blacks enjoyed the same rights and privileges as white English settlers, by the 1640s colonial legislatures had enacted laws that gave landowners the right to own chattel slaves.

  45. Carl Seyffert, Biene und Honig im Volksleben der Afrikaner (“Beekeeping in Africa”), 11. According to linguistics professor Lowell Bouma, the African word “kandir,” which is similar to “candle,” supports David Livingstone’s thesis that the primary market for beeswax in seventeenth-century Africa was the Portugese, who needed it for religious rituals.

  46. Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 529.

  47. Seyffert, Beekeeping in Africa, 193. In his book, Seyffert considers his own research incomplete, and much of his information was gathered before World War I. As a consequence of WWI, his book was not published until 1930.

  48. Ibid., 129.

  49. Ibid., 121.

  50. Ibid., 130.

  51. Neil Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World,” 11.

  52. Stephen Potter, Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs, 33.

  53. Hahman, “A History of Bee Culture in Pennsylvania,” 409.

  54. Frank C. Pellett, History of American Beekeeping, 3.

  55. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Facing Off, 161.

  56. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 188.

  57. Everett Oertel, “Bicentennial Bees, Part I,” 71.

  58. Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 303.

  59. Edward Goodell, “Bees by Sailing Ship and Covered Wagon.”

  60. In talking about sugar in England, Timothy Raylor discusses Samuel Hartlib’s thesis on sugar’s possibility to lift England out of a recession. Hartlib concluded that sugar was a problematic commodity for the English to count on in economic terms: it could not be grown in England, it was expensive to produce, and it would do little to alleviate the English economy in 1650 (a time of recession). Thus, Hartlib began his treatise on honey.

  61. Everett Oertel, “Bicentennial Bees, Part I,” American Bee Journal 116, no. 2 (1976): 70.

  62. Jordan and Kaups, American Backwoods Frontier, 231.

  63. Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 304.

  64. Hartlib’s The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees (London, 1655) contains one of the first architectural designs by Christopher Wren (Timothy Raylor, “Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees,” 92). It was one of the first multistoried beehive designs to appear in print.

  65. Ann Fairfax Withington, “Republican Bees,” 55.

  66. Eric Nelson, “History of Beekeeping in the United States,” 2.

  67. J. Earl Massey, Early Money Substitutes, 15.

  68. Nelson, “History of Beekeeping in the United States,” 2. John Eales was employed by Newbury in 1644 to build beehives. See also Oertel, “Bicentennial Bees, Part II,” 138, and S. Bagster, Management of Bees (1838).

  69. Massey, Early Money Substitutes, 16.

  70. Arnold and Connie Krochmal, “Origins of United States Beekeeping,” 162.

  71. Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 304–5.

  72. “To an extent, their advance was due to human intervention, humans with hives on their rafts and wagons moving into Indian territory, but in most cases the avant-garde of these Old World insects moved west independently…. But the Appalachians were the real barrier for them…. They did get across and then seem to have spread even more rapidly in the Mississippi basin than they had east of the Appalachians” (Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 189).

  73. Eva Crane, Archaeology of Beekeeping, 95.

  Chapter 2. Bees and the Revolution

  1. Lester C. Olson, Emblems of American Community, 7.

  2. William Eaton, “Sketches from Kentucky’s Beekeeping History,” 22. Eaton divides Kentucky beekeeping into four periods, beginning with the years 1780 to 1871.

  3. Jerard and Pat Jordan, Spirit of America in Country Furniture.

  4. William Sachs, “Business of Colonization,” 13.

  5. Everett Oertel, “Bicentennial Bees, Part I,” 71.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Oertel, “Honey Bees Taken to Cuba,” 880. This brief article contains a wealth of information. J. Preston Moore was the translator of Antonio de Ulloa’s Noticias Americanas, entretenimiento fisico-historico sobre la America meridional y la septentrional (translated as Revolt in Louisiana, and originally published in Spanish in 1776).

  8. Ibid., 880. Ulloa’s writings also reflect the common misperception during that time period that bees could injure sugar cane plants. It was assumed that because bees had stingers they could puncture fruit to get nectar. The Spanish were not the only ones to suspect bees of damaging crops. Both German-American and French-American neighbors used to accuse local beekeepers of property damage when grapes were punctured.

  9. Lester Breininger, “Beekeeping and Bee Lore in Pennsyl
vania,” 35. An interesting side note is that Breininger cites records from his ancestors for his arguments.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Wayland Hand, “Anglo-American Folk Belief and Custom,” 151, 152.

  12. J. E. Crane, “Siftings,” 714. Crane uses his own experience in which a beekeeper had died, and thereafter the bee yard had been neglected. “Surely it was a sorry day for that yard of bees when their master died, and they had to pass the winter with so little care.”

  13. Breininger, “Beekeeping and Bee Lore in Pennsylvania.” Breininger uses the phrase “wann en leicht fatt geet, mus mir die eama ricka.”

  14. Hand, “Anglo-American Folk Belief and Custom,” 150.

  15. Kathleen Giraldi, “Noah Atwater and His Contribution to Westfield Life.”

  16. Breininger, “Beekeeping and Bee Lore in Pennsylvania,” 39.

  17. L. R. Stewart, “Early Midwest Beekeeping,” 412.

  18. Daniel McKinley, “The White Man’s Fly on the Frontier,” 444.

  19. Hunter James, Quiet People of the Land, 13.

  20. Ibid., 17.

  21. Ibid.

  22. John R Weinlick, Count Zinzendorf. David Zeisberger was born in Zauchtenthal in the eastern part of Moravia in 1721. When his parents moved to Herrnhut, located on Count Zinzendorf’s estate, they were searching for religious freedom. They later moved to Georgia but left their son David in Herrnhut. David then followed his parents to Georgia. While there, David was influenced by Bishop Peter Boehler, the German clergyman who also converted John Wesley, leader of the Methodists.

  23. Ibid., 160. An interesting aside is that Count Zinzendorf named Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (which was founded by the Moravians), on his visit to America in 1741. According to Weinlick, “Only a Zinzendorf could have christened a community so dramatically. With the Brethren gathered in a barn housing themselves and their cattle, Zinzendorf began to lead them in a German Epiphany carol combining Christmas and missionary thoughts.”