The Pastor of the Bees
I
WHEN you walk into a grocery store and look about you upon all the wondrous works of God, your mind must linger often upon the honey. For those who prefer it in the comb, the bees have put it up in one-pound sections, all neatly built into frames of basswood four and a quarter inches square. For those who might want to buy the sweetness without the wax, and are willing to forgo the privilege of having those delicate cells break inwardly upon the tongue, it comes clear and beautiful in a bottle. In either form it is delightful; though, as for me, I have always felt that honey is a work that is worthy of a frame.
In order to get the bees to produce honey for him, man must proceed by taking the measure of the bee. It has been found that the thickness of a working bee of the standard strain is 163/1000 of an inch, that being the width of opening she can pass through without discomfort. A somewhat ampler and freer fit, to be used in parts of the hive where more freedom is allowable, is from three sixteenths to three eighths of an inch; but nowhere in the brood department must this latter measurement be exceeded.
If a swarm of bees were allowed to conduct a hive according to their own notions, they would do about everything that a man does not want. Their principal concern in life is the raising of young; consequently honeycomb, in a state of nature, is filled with bee life in every stage of development from the egg to the full-grown insect. Some cells will contain the eggs, almost microscopically small; others little white worms; others big fat grubs; others quiescent nymphs or pupæ; still others the stores of pollen or flower dust upon which the young are fed. Others, again, contain the supply of honey for present and future needs; and it is this sort of indiscriminate mixture that drips from the paw of the bear and constitutes the sort of meal that a bear likes to sit down to. But it is hardly the sort of honey that the grocer would offer to a customer.
A hive, therefore, is built with upper and lower stories. In the lower story the bees are allowed to manage their affairs somewhat as they would in a state of nature, while the upper part is to receive the clear, broodless honey for the use of man. A screen of sheet zinc having oblong holes 163/1000 of an inch in width, or a grid of smooth wires accurately spaced, is usually placed between the two stories. This arrangement permits the workers to pass upward with their loads of nectar while it prevents the passage of the bigger-bodied queen when she goes on a quest for more cells to lay eggs in. The result is obvious. With no eggs going into the upper story, there will be no little white worms, no big fat grubs, no nascent nymphs, and no store of special food for the feeding of the young; and the clear comb honey will be fit to grace the big cut-glass bowl and attract to its scintillating self all the finer allusions of the grace before meat.
In modern practice the zinc excluder, with its sharp edges burred by the die, is being displaced by the grid of smooth wire which does not wear out the bee’s wings so quickly, and consequently affords a bigger yield of honey. In this case the spacing is but 162/1000 of an inch, and most ingenious means are used to space the wires so accurately.
This standard opening in the queen excluder, while it serves such a useful function in honey production, is, nevertheless, among the less important of the measurements used in the management of the bee. Far more fundamental is what is known as the ‘bee space,’ a measurement ranging from three sixteenths to three eighths of an inch, beyond which limits error must not go. The bee space, the basic secret in hive building, was discovered in this country in 1852. Its exact limits were determined, not by the simple means of measuring a bee’s body, but by experiment with the nature and psychology of the bee at work. Its importance is such that it has worked a world-wide revolution in hive building and in methods of beekeeping.
Up to the year 1852, man had no practical means to regulate and control the interior economy of a beehive. It was a closed world to the beekeeper; he could only enter it and take his share by killing the bees with sulphur, or by turning it upside down and acting as an invader and destroyer. This was because the modern hive with movable combs had not been invented; and this is but another way of saying that the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a Congregational minister who loved both bees and men, had not yet appeared upon the scene. He not only discovered the principle, but he devised the hive which gave it practical and permanent application. All other inventions pertaining to the hive, such as the queen excluder, are subsequent and secondary in their nature; for, without the movable-comb hive itself, they would be useless.
This measurement and principle called a bee space affects honey production in so many ways, and ramifies the discipline of the hive to such an extent, that it may be said to comprise the whole art of bee management. A little explanation of the fundamental facts of bee life will make this easily understood. And moreover it will help us appreciate the life work of a man about whom the public knows too little.
II
Nature did not intend a swarm of bees to produce a great surplus of honey over and above the amount needed to raise their young, found new colonies, and support them through the greater part of the year. In the few short weeks of honey flow, the bees must hurry in enough to last them through all the flowerless months of fall and winter and spring; and so great is the rush of life with them, in periods when the nectar is coming, that they work themselves to death almost as rapidly as new generations can be raised. If man wants them to lay by a considerable extra store for his own use, he must make certain changes in their way of life.
First, he must relieve them of the task of making wax and shaping it into cells. To make one pound of wax, bees must use from seven to fifteen pounds of honey, eating and digesting it and extruding it from their bodies in the form of wax scales. Wax is a form of animal oil or fat, and it takes a great deal of food to make a little fat. While doing this, great numbers of bees hang inert from the roof of the hive; so that, in making material for comb building, they not only consume a great deal of honey, but they lose time during which they might otherwise be working afield and bringing in more nectar. There is here a loss in two directions.
Second, he must see to it that the colony does not produce the thousands of drones which nature prompts it to nurse and nurture and support in adult idleness. These shining gentlemen of leisure could not gather nectar and pollen even if they had a mind to, for nature has not provided them with the special bodily parts needed in such work. They live upon the honey which the other bees bring in and deposit in the cells. Their life is a pleasant one while it lasts. They hang about the entrance of the hive, taking the sun and making idle excursions in the most inviting hours of the day. It has been estimated that it takes the labor of six working bees to support one healthy drone. And yet the bees are inclined to raise them in great numbers. If this were all, it would not be so bad; but every drone that is hatched and raised requires the use of one of those waxen cradles or cells, which, if it were not being occupied by a drone, would serve to produce a worker. The drone not only consumes honey himself, but he reduces the number of bees that are making it. Besides this, when he is not basking outside in good weather, he is cumbering the surface of the combs and getting in the way; and thus the raising of drones, like the making of wax, involves loss in several directions. Certainly, if man is to have much honey for himself, he must contrive a way to keep the queen from laying so many drone eggs.
Third, he must keep the bees from ‘swarming.’ Bees have an instinct which prompts them, at the height of a honey flow, to subdivide their community, sending out a delegation to establish a new colony. The greater part of the swarm, consisting of the older working bees and the queen, will be seized with the moving fever; and some day when the weather is just right they will make their exodus to the promised land, leaving behind only enough bees to tend the thousands of young in their cradles and give a proper start to the new generation that will inherit the hive. The absconders, settling first on a near-by bush or tree, and making sure that the queen is with them, strike out for some hollow tree or other suitable habitation; and, once started, they will never turn back, no matter what fortune may befall them. They have made their last will and testament, leaving all to the children, and there is no danger that the old hive, with its accumulated riches of honey and its complete furniture of comb, will ever see them again.
Having parted with everything, they must now start the world all over again, like Robinson Crusoe or Adam; and this is a most strenuous and risky undertaking when you consider that a bee can do nothing in a home without furniture, and that all her prosperity depends upon the weather. We have already seen that this furniture costs a great deal in time and effort, to say nothing of the honey that must be laid by. In the new home the bees will have to work hard while the honey flow is on to get enough comb built and enough nectar stored away to keep the colony over winter. At best they will hardly have more than enough to last them; and as for the depleted swarm that they left behind, they will have to increase and multiply, starting with a new queen; and the newly hatched bees will have to improve each shining hour if they are going into winter with a big, warm cluster of bees and sufficient food to support the population.
From the standpoint of a bee owner, this habit of swarming is unnecessary and foolish. It is evident that if a colony of bees can break off work right at the height of the season, and start the world all over again by building expensive new combs, they have a great deal of energy to spare. And if this surplus energy were kept at home and devoted wholly to honey making it would bring large results. Fifty to a hundred pounds of honey would be gained by each colony — and in some localities a much greater amount; and the beekeeper could carry away this much without taking any that the bees would need for their proper support.
That it is quite unnecessary for bees to leave the home hive can be shown by a simple example in arithmetic. As the queen lays a certain maximum number of eggs a day — about three thousand — and it takes twenty-one days for a worker to hatch and come to maturity, and the life of a worker in the busy season is about five weeks, it is plain that the size of a swarm is limited and fixed by these figures. The bees do not swarm because they are crowded out by a continual increase in numbers. Moreover, the size of the lower story or brood chamber has been calculated with these figures in mind, remembering that every square inch of comb contains fifty-five cells — twenty-seven to twenty-eight on each side. As the hive builder has computed these measurements with fair accuracy in the brood chamber, and as the beekeeper is quite willing to furnish them with new upper stories as fast as they fill them, it is plain that bees can have no real excuse for acting as they do. Their custom of having but one queen, whose capacity is limited and whose laying season is short, together with the high rate of mortality among her offspring, makes a set of conditions which keep the possible size of a swarm within bounds and make it somewhat standard. Hence they could — if they would only listen to reason as the beekeeper sees it — just as well stay at home and keep on making honey. The one brood chamber would accommodate them all; and that surplus energy which they use for colonizing could be turned into surplus honey in the upper stories. It is one big swarm with a single queen, not two small swarms with two queens, that can find time to make honey for man’s benefit.
What most people do not know, though it is a main factor in the beekeeper’s calculations, is that honeycomb is not a perishing and temporary thing. The same comb serves the purposes of the bees year after year; it has been known to be good at the end of twenty years and even longer. The house of the bee is a permanent institution, intended to serve future generations and hold the honey of many summers in the place in which it was founded. It is only the inhabitants that change. And right here is where the bee’s conduct seems most outrageous to the mind of the bee man. The queen, going her spiral round from cell to cell, needs only a certain area of comb. After twenty-one days, at three thousand or more eggs a day, her brood begins to hatch, and the empty cells are ready for her to use over again. These cells, together with enough cells to hold the current and winter supplies, would serve for all time; and thus the bees, having never any comb to build for themselves, could spend their whole superfluity of time in putting honey in the upper story for the use of man. It is perfectly logical, entirely natural — a consummation devoutly to be wished!
The attitude of the beekeeper as he stands, pencil in hand, and contemplates the promising facts and figures, is quite understandable. It is plain that if we are to have honey in any quantity we must devise some way of keeping the whole swarm in one house. We must checkmate nature in that instinct to start a new colony. The surplus of energy that is put into such enterprises is just the energy we need to supply us with honey.
III
Strange as it would seem to a beekeeper of a hundred years ago, — or a thousand years ago, for that matter, — all these things are quite easily done. In all those little white boxes that stand in rows in any farmer’s yard — boxes of white magic that are not half as simple as they look — it is a matter of everyday practice. And the way it is done is simple enough in the telling.
In the production of extracted honey, the problem of relieving the bees of the work of wax making is solved by movable combs. The bees build their combs in large, light wooden frames, which are free to be lifted out of the hive and as freely returned to it. Upon being removed full of ripe honey, a long knife is drawn across the surface of the comb so as to cut off the capping of the cells, thus releasing the warm and quite liquid honey. A centrifugal machine, whirling the comb rapidly inside a metal container, causes every last drop of honey to fly out of the cells and leaves them fairly clean; after which the frames of uninjured comb, of which there are usually ten to a story, are put back in the hive to be refilled by the bees. There is thus no delay in building cells to accommodate the swift bounty of summer. There is no hanging in festoons from the roof of the hive to consume honey and produce wax. The bees instead hurry in more and more of the golden hoard while the nectaries are flowing and before a change of weather causes them to close. It is a labor-saving system of great importance to the managers of bees.
The second problem, that of preventing the queen from laying male eggs and producing drones, is accomplished by means of sheets of wax run through a pair of engraved rollers working like a wash wringer. Bees build their cells of two sizes, those intended for the reception of male eggs being one fourth of an inch across, while those that are to receive worker eggs measure one fifth of an inch. The queen, going her rounds from cell to cell as methodically as a farmer dropping corn in rows, lays eggs that are very small, first thrusting her head into each cell as if to inspect its condition. When she comes to one of these larger cells she will deposit a male egg in it, while one of the other cells, intended to hold a bee of the opposite or worker sex, will receive an egg such as its size calls for.
The queen, by a miraculous-seeming provision of nature, has power to control the sex of the eggs she lays. Man has taken advantage of this state of affairs by engraving on the metal rolls which make the sheets of wax the outline of cells of the worker variety. A sheet of this comb ‘foundation’ is fastened into the frame into which comb is to be built; and the bees, willingly making use of what man has begun for them, rapidly draw out the wax into cells which produce nothing but worker bees. When comb gets old or broken in handling, or is damaged in the centrifugal machine, it is renewed in this way; and the beekeeper has always a spare stock of comb large enough to meet the demands of the busiest season. And he uses the same comb over and over, catching the honey crop as fast as the bees bring it in.
While this is the practice in producing extracted honey, comb honey is in a somewhat different case, for here the customer insists upon having the whole product. As the same comb cannot be used over and over, the foundation machine comes into use each time a crop is taken off. The middle wall, or midriff, of each little section of comb honey is produced by the rollers from wax on hand. This is fitted into the one-pound basswood sections, and the bees rapidly draw out the cells. While this does not eventually save the bees the labor of making wax to replace the wax that is sold with the honey, it greatly lessens the work they need to do in building the comb. The wax on hand may be from extractor combs that have become damaged or broken down.
Thirdly, — and I hope my readers remember that this is going to be the story of a preacher, — we have to consider the swarming problem. If we are going to have honey for the table, the bees must not waste their time going away to build new mansions of wax. Their instinct to do this is accordingly frustrated by taking advantage of a still stronger commandment in the bee world. Under no circumstances will a swarm of bees strike out for a new location without being sure that the queen is with them. If anything has happened to prevent her coming, they soon know it; and in that case they give up their colonizing plans for the time being and return to the hive. The sagacious beekeeper turns this detail to his own advantage by clipping off a wing of the queen bee in each hive. And then he takes a more fundamental precaution. A swarm of bees will not leave a hive without taking measures to provide a new queen for the ones who stay behind and carry on the business of the old home. When they intend leaving, they build large queen cells and start a number of royal babies that are duly sealed up and left to develop; and if all their plans go well, though much depends upon the weather, they may time this queen hatching so that the queen-to-be would ordinarily make her appearance about a week after the swarm has departed. The beekeeper, knowing this, keeps track of his bees’ intentions by going through the hives at regular intervals; and he takes pains to destroy all royal progeny in its cradle and to damage materially any queen cells that may have been started.
As there may be as many as a hundred thousand bees in a hive, it might seem an impossible task to pick out the queen from such a throng in every colony. It must be kept in mind that the combs in the modern hive are movable. It would indeed be impossible were it not that the combs may be taken out, one after another, and held up to the light of day. The queen, surrounded by her royal escort, with their heads all toward her, is like a marked paragraph in a book; and she is soon picked out from the rest of the text. And then, a wing being snipped off, she will never make a success of any effort to abscond with the swarm. This treatment will not, however, keep her from trying when the time comes. To prevent all such efforts upon the part of the swarm, the combs must all be gone over once in ten days — a considerable task for a man with many colonies. In case he neglects, or is too busy, the wingless queen holds the situation in control for him. While the truant swarm is hanging in a seething mass on the limb of a near-by bush or tree, the queen will be found in the grass at the front of the hive making lopsided efforts to fly. The beekeeper puts her back in the hive in a little cage; and now he may rest assured that the congregation temporarily holding conference on the limb of the tree will make a change in its plans and return to the hive. It is not really the same hive, however, for the beekeeper has been shrewd enough to put in the place of the old hive one whose interior has been made more inviting by means of some empty comb all ready for the queen to fill with brood. And then the bees in the other hive, flying afield and coming back with their loads, will enter this one, thinking it is the one they have been using because it occupies the same location; and thus all the working bees of the original swarm are brought together again under one queen. The result is that while they may think they have successfully swarmed, being at work in a different interior, they have not swarmed at all, because they have not succeeded in dividing their forces. The beekeeper has had his way; and now they are not going to waste their time in colonizing and building new comb and raising drones. It is not the mere absconding of the swarm that the beekeeper objects to; it is this division of forces which reduces the honey output and turns the bees’ energies in a direction that is useless to him.
IV
There is a great deal of human nature as well as bee nature to be studied in the bee yard. In former days it was thought that if the owner died, and the bees were not formally notified of the fact, they would stop making honey. Consequently it was the custom to hang black crape on every hive while someone went through the operation of ‘telling the bees.’ Now that science has taken the place of superstition, the beekeeper does not tell them anything; he fools them.
Up to the year 1852, when Langstroth invented the movable-comb hive, the ‘brimstone pit’ for suffocating the bees in the fall was a regular part of the apiary. According to that oldworld and world-old method, beekeeping was a very simple procedure. All you had to do was to get a swarm of bees into a box, a hollow log, or a ‘skep’ of twisted straw, and leave them to their own devices. They could be depended upon to clean house, fill all cracks with a cement of wax and resin, repair any imperfections, and set to work in accordance with the ancient laws of the craft. If you wanted to get any honey without killing them you would have to turn the hive upside down and dig right into the comb; and if you expected to keep them over winter you would be careful not to take much, else they would not have a surplus sufficient to last them. Naturally, the usual custom was to wait till autumn, when the crop was all in, and rob them outright. And, as this was to be the end of the bees, the hives were kept for a while in the fumes of burning sulphur to make the operation easier.
This method brought greater immediate reward, but it was destructive of the source of profit. And besides, the quality of the honey, some of it stored in cells adjacent to dead brood or bitter and often poisonous pollen, was not likely to be of the best. Sometimes, in order to save it all, the comb would be melted and the honey heated till the foreign matter rose in a scum which could be skimmed off; and this was likely to result in an unsavory mess.
As knowledge of the bee became more scientific, the invention of hives began. Inventors in England, France, America, and Russia produced hives with ingenious features, but they all ended in failure. They were not founded on a close study of the bee.
And then Pastor Langstroth, a most interesting and lovable man who was minister of a Congregational church in Philadelphia, made the discovery regarding bee nature which was to have world-wide effect and change the methods of beekeeping for all time.
His object was to make a movablecomb hive. But, while this is easily said, it was not easily done; and the more one studies the habits of bees, the more impossible it appears. It is bee nature, whether in a hollow log or a home of planed pine, to give the interior a coat of varnish, use propolis freely, buttress the combs securely to the roof or sides, and build cells in any available space. In this view of affairs, any expectation that ‘removable’ frames could be put in a hive and remain movable after the bees had set to work on them would seem doomed to disappointment. A little experiment or two would soon show such a scheme to be impractical and foolish. One might as well expect bees to alter their whole nature as to think that they would not fasten these frames to the wall of the hive.
But Langstroth had long loved to work with bees; and he made a discovery. His discovery, as we have already intimated, had to do with a bee’s policy, or mental attitude, toward openings of a certain width inside the hive. This policy manifests itself as follows. If the bee finds in the hive a passageway of a width between three sixteenths and three eighths of an inch, she will not fill it with comb or glue it up with propolis, but will keep it as a space to be used in passing to and fro. If the opening is less than three sixteenths of an inch, she regards it as a crack or flaw which needs to be varnished over and filled with propolis. If it is more than three eighths of an inch, she regards it as room in which cells may be built. But anything between these measurements the bee seems to look upon as a sailor does ‘gangway’ — a place to be kept clear. While these measurements represent the extremes that are allowable, practice has shown that results are surest with openings not more than five sixteenths or less than one quarter of an inch. This measurement, now standard, has become known as the bee space.
The Langstroth hive was built to take advantage of this point in bee nature, the movable frames being made of such a size that there would be just a bee space between the ends of the frames and the walls of the hive; and the same spacing was provided for between the tops of the frames in a lower story and the bottoms of the frames in a story above. In short, there must be no space in the hive after the frames have been filled with comb that does not correspond with this measurement which the bee recognizes and respects. But, as bees work back-to-back on the surfaces of the adjacent combs, there will here need to be a double spacing. Comb is about an inch thick, and so the beekeeper will space his frames so that when the comb is built out to its natural depth the proper back-to-back spacing will be left between them.
The whole result of this science of spacing in connection with a movablecomb and top-opening hive is that one story may be lifted freely off another, enabling the beekeeper to take away his crop of honey quite separate from that which belongs to the bees; and the combs in the brood chamber may be taken out and freely manipulated, thus creating conditions which will cause a honey crop many times larger than could be expected under natural conditions. The modern beehive, invented in America, is very American in its nature. It is efficient. It adopts the best methods for quantity production. It surpasses anything of the kind ever invented in Europe. No bee of ancient Greece or Egypt, or even the early Victorian era, could hold a candle for efficiency to the modern, American, fully industrialized bee. Europeans stuck to the theory for many years that our great honey production was due to some peculiarity of the flora of this continent, but they finally learned that it was due to the hive with movable combs.
V
The beehive which Langstroth invented in 1852 has not been improved in any essential detail from that day to this. It was practically perfect from the beginning; and here I believe it is unique among mechanical inventions. It is essentially unimprovable. A hive may be built with a brood chamber larger or smaller to suit conditions, but it has got to remain a Langstroth hive in principle in order to do the work.
The movable-comb, top-opening hive has revolutionized beekeeping in America and had an influence that is worldwide. It has won its way on its merits in country after country. In the mechanical world it is a signal demonstration of the survival of the fittest. A man may go from one end of America to the other, and even to the remotest countries to which our exports have penetrated, and he will find that the frames and various appurtenances of one hive are an exact fit for every other hive. The Langstroth frame measures 175/8 by 91/8 inches, outside measurement, and the manufacturers of hives all make their hives accordingly. A beekeeper in one of California’s great apiaries may buy the small outfit of a New England beekeeper and know that every part and every appliance will match and mingle with his own. Not even the Ford car has equaled it in observing the mechanical principle of interchangeability, and of setting a standard that is national.
It has become the hive of England and of France and of the Frenchspeaking part of Switzerland; and it has made steady progress among the apiaries of Italy and Germany. American hives have been adopted in Canada, Mexico, the West Indies, South America, South Africa, Australasia, Belgium, Russia, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and other countries. It has increased the output of the world’s honey ‘from hundredweights to tons.’
Besides having movable combs and being top-opening for convenience in handling, a hive must have oblong frames, of scientific proportions, and these frames should hang free with very little point of contact and come out without crushing bees. Langstroth incorporated all these features in his hive at once. He met complex requirements with an invention of masterly simplicity.
He was himself a man of simple and lovable nature, and had a certain common sense and benevolence of outlook which reminded those who knew him of Benjamin Franklin. He protected his invention with a patent, but was unable to guard and enforce his rights; and when the end came, one day in 1895, he died without a dollar. It is now generally recognized that he was the ‘father of American beekeeping’ and that no inventor anywhere was prior to him.
It has been said that, up to 1852, the world had never improved in any way upon the beekeeping of the ancient Greeks. As a matter of fact, the beekeeping of the Middle Ages was hardly as good as theirs. The Greeks had three hundred treatises upon the bee; and the fourth book of Vergil’s Georgics is a poem on bee management. It is only when we think of the beekeeping of the ancients that we get a just estimate of the modern invention. As sugar cane was not brought to Europe from India until comparatively modern times, and the possibilities of the sugar beet were unknown, man’s principal source of sweets was the hive. There was every possible incentive to study bee nature and perfect it. The yield of this important crop could have been increased tenfold if someone had only known enough to make a plain wooden box of certain proportions containing frames of a certain fit. In the making of a hive there is nothing needed of modern manufacturing equipment. It can all be done with woodworking tools as simple as those that Christ used in plying his worldly trade. That the hive was not invented in all these centuries is due to the fact that it is a most complex invention founded upon observations in natural history that were neither easy to make nor simple to cope with by mechanical means. In one regard it is a mere white box or two sitting in the farmer’s dooryard. At the same time it is the most complicate of mechanisms, being most diverse and intricate in the conditions which it meets and fulfills.
One who knew nothing about it beyond its mere appearance might naturally inquire, ‘How is it complicated? Where are its cams and cogwheels, its springs and plungers and quick-acting fingers of iron?’ The answer is that its intricacy is not visible. It takes the form of figures and shrewd calculations. It copes with the hidden psychology of the bee as well as her mere bodily measurements. Its every proportion and spacing, seeming to be nothing, deals in some manner with the perplexing problem of the bee.
VI
As Langstroth was one of the greatest of our nature students, judged by what he actually accomplished, and as he was a man of most pleasing and interesting personality, one might suppose that his name would be familiar to Americans generally, and especially to lovers of nature. That his name is so little known is due, I imagine, to the difficulty of explaining a hive in a few words so that it may be appreciated by the average man. Without an understanding of the hive, one cannot properly value what Langstroth did. As it is, his name is so little known that there is no biographical sketch of him in any encyclopædia, English or American. But his fame is looking up, and will some day be better attended to. Let me make a beginning by setting down here some of the principal facts of his fife as known to his fellow beekeepers.
Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth was born on Christmas Day, in the year 1810, at Philadelphia. His parents were members of ‘Mr. Barnes’ church’ in that city, this being the mother Presbyterian church in the United States. Family tradition tells us that when the boy became interested in the ants working in gravel walks, and experimented upon them with crumbs of bread, his parents deplored that their son should show an inclination to such frivolous pursuits when he might employ the time improving his mind.
In 1827 he entered Yale College and graduated in 1831. From 1834 to 1836 he served as tutor in mathematics at Yale while he completed his studies in preparation for the ministry. In May 1836, he became pastor of the Second Congregational Church at Andover, Massachusetts, and in August of the same year he was married to Miss A. M. Tucker of New Haven, Connecticut.
After two years in the ministry ill health compelled him to resign his pastorate. For a while in 1838 and 1839 he was principal of the Abbott Female Academy at Andover, and in the latter year he moved to Greenfield, Massachusetts, to become principal of the high school for young ladies. In Greenfield he remained nine years, serving five years as principal of the school for young ladies and four years as pastor of the Second Congregational Church.
In 1848 he moved back to the city of his birth, where he again became principal of a school for young ladies; and after four years in this position he returned to Greenfield.
It was now fourteen years since he first became interested in bees. In 1837, the year after he left Yale, a friend whom he was visiting took him up in the attic and showed him where bees were being kept. His interest in the study of nature, early manifested by his curiosity regarding ants, now became wholly centred upon bees, and before long he was the owner of two colonies in old-fashioned box hives. His knowledge of bees at this time was confined to his Latin readings in Vergil, and to a modern writer who was ‘somewhat skeptical regarding the existence of a queen bee.’ Thereafter he continued to keep bees, finding pleasure in the study of their habits and benefit to his health through the outdoor exercise they afforded him.
Eventually the thought occurred to him that it might be possible to make a hive so that the interior would be subject to inspection, and after trying all the inventions which had that end in view, including the leaf hive of Huber, he conceived the movable-frame hive and set to work to solve its problems. At the same time he decided to reconsider the problems of beekeeping generally and to design a hive best fitted ‘to remedy the many difficulties with which bee-culture is beset, by adapting my invention to the actual habits and wants of the insect.’ In October 1851, he completed the movable-comb, opentop hive. And he records in his journal, on October 30 of that year, ‘The use of these frames will, I am persuaded, give a new impetus to the easy and profitable management of bees.’ In 1852 he procured the patent which was never to be of any benefit to him, but rather a subject that brought harassment and worry. His health was never reliable, and from his twentieth year he suffered occasional attacks of a distressing ‘head trouble’ which would give him an aversion to his studies and keep him away from his work for months at a time.
In 1858 he moved to Oxford, Ohio, where, with the help of his son, he engaged in the propagation of Italian queen bees.
In 1887, being then seventy-seven years of age, he went to live in Dayton, Ohio. His wife, always a devoted helpmeet and source of inspiration to him, had died fourteen years before, in 1873. The death of his son, a railroad accident, and a recurrence of his old head trouble, caused him to give up active beekeeping; but he continued to take part in beekeepers’ meetings and to maintain his interest in teaching and preaching. Beekeepers in all parts of the country, cognizant of the great importance of his work, now regarded him as ‘the father of American apiculture,’ and listened with great interest whenever he consented to address them.
In the meantime, circumstances or other influences had attracted him toward the Presbyterian Church, in which he had been born and raised. Writing under date of March 26, 1888, he says: ‘I am now a minister in the Presbyterian Church. Although not a settled pastor, I preach occasionally, and delight in nothing so much as the Christian work.’ And he mentions that his parents were members of ‘Mr. Barnes’ Presbyterian church’ in Philadelphia.
He died on October 6, 1895, at the Wayne Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio, while he was preaching the morning sermon. As he was then eighty-five years of age and too feeble to stand throughout the sermon, the regular minister, Reverend Amos O. Raber, had moved the pulpit aside and placed a chair for him to sit in. After a few opening remarks and requests for prayer from members of the congregation, he said, ‘ I am a firm believer in prayer. It is of the love of God that I wish to speak to you this morning — what it has been, what it is, and what it means to us, and what we ought — ’
These were the last words that he spoke.
His daughter, Anna L. Cowan, who was present, has thus described the last scene: —
‘As he finished the last word he hesitated; his form straightened out convulsively; his head fell backward, and in about three minutes he was absent from the body, at home with the Lord. There was no scene of confusion in the church. Tears were running down every cheek, but there were no screams, no loud sobbing. As one person remarked, “Heaven never seemed so near before. It seemed but a step.” ’
The Ohio Beekeepers Association, at its meeting in August 1925, decided that it was time that more recognition was given to the man on whose discoveries so large an industry had been founded, and it accordingly established a memorial endowment fund in Cornell University. As an outcome of this move the secretary of the Beekeepers Association, Miss Florence Naile, succeeded in bringing to light his long-lost journal. It was found in an attic in Dayton, where he had formerly lived. In this journal he kept record of his observations upon bees for fortyfive years. Though he mentioned it occasionally during his life, little was known of what was in it. It was found to contain innumerable records of observations upon bees of which only a small part had ever been published by him. It records in detail the steps through which his work passed in the invention of the modern beehive; and it is, therefore, a detailed history of the early stages of the modern science of beekeeping.
At the following meeting of the Ohio Beekeepers Association, at Medina, Ohio, in September 1926, this journal was formally presented to the Beekeeping Library of Cornell University, where it will be made available to future students of apiculture. It will form the corner stone of the Beekeeping Library of the University, which is now, in large part, a memorial to the man whose work has had such wide influence.