Bees in America Read online

  Hartlib’s original intent had been to convince Parliament that England should be a nation of self-sufficient beekeepers, but he was very interested in the beekeeping possibilities in the New World. He sent a copy of A Reformed Commonwealth of Bees to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. Hartlib’s expectations for English beekeepers did not succeed, but Hartlib “introduced a high level of co-operation and institutionalism to the search for new apicultural techniques,” according to Raylor.14

  Because the New World was still undeveloped through much of the seventeenth century, the colonists were not in a position to capitalize on Hartlib’s new beehive designs. Furthermore, the slave trade involved too much money for American and English businessmen to discontinue their involvement. The slave trade and sugar became inextricably linked by the seventeenth century. Once cheap sugar became readily available, the English and Americans did not really care how their sugar was processed and ignored the slavery question for two centuries. Thus, Hartlib’s plans for self-sufficiency, at least in terms of sweeteners, were never taken seriously.

  But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

  The immediate crisis that forced the issue of New World colonization was not sugar, at least in the early 1600s. The crisis developed from a combination of dire circumstances happening at the same time: bad weather, lack of food, and lack of work. The obvious answer to relieve overpopulation was the New World. America became the place for those displaced or dispossessed: “The drones of England became the workers of America,” explains Kupperman.15 New England offered poor people a chance to escape land contracts, the vagaries of bad weather leading to bad harvests, and increasing taxes on very little yield. But the popular analogy between the New World and the hive simplified the complexities of poverty. And the comparisons of males to drones in travel literature did nothing to solve outdated land or social policies.

  The English desperately wanted social and political order, but changes were happening too rapidly on too many fronts—social, economic, agricultural, scientific, political. When the English began to colonize the New World, their New World, with their own marginalized people, they adopted the metaphor of the hive—along with its ancient classical traditions and simple gendered social structure—to categorize people and behaviors. Many writers and colonists liked to project an image of America as an orderly, ideal hive, even though early America was a frontier when compared to Europe’s standards of society.16

  Furthermore, early colonists were determined to hold onto the rhetoric of apiculture, despite how often the ideal beehive model of society failed to meet reality in Massachusetts and Virginia: “Endorsed by both ancient wisdom and nature, the hive seemed to offer a perfect model for colonization,” writes Kupperman.17 The keyword in Kupperman’s sentence is seemed, for the hive model was a beautiful theory that did not withstand the harsh realities of New World life.

  Just as the English craved order, so too did the colonists, and the beehive image represented efficiency, industry, and, most important, social stability. The associations with this image became much more powerful than colonial beekeeping was. The negative associations colonists had of idle people who did not or could not work transferred from England to the colonies. Leaders consistently equated “idle poor” with “drones” in Jamestown and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In other words, the colonists were preconditioned to see people who weren’t “busy as bees” as lazy and slothful and deserving of the fate that happens to drones at the end of summer: to be forced out of society.

  Four centuries after hiving off from England and Europe, Americans know a thing or two about bees. We now know that the larvae of flies, not bees, nest in the carcasses of cattle. It turns out the beautiful myth of Aristaeus, Cyrene, and Proteus is reduced to plain old larvae. Virgil and his peers erroneously thought the larvae of the fly Eristalis tenax or those of blowflies were the larvae of honey bees because they look very similar.18

  We also know how dangerous it is to simplify society by the use of examples in nature. However, many Americans still value the honey bee as a symbol of thrift and industry. This value seems to be one of the lingering philosophies from seventeenth-century England, in which the royal authorities and clergy dictated that the lower classes and unemployed should be “busy as bees” so they would not rebel. When the English began to label their own members of society as “drones,” they privileged a new set of values based on work, thrift, and efficiency. The American Dream still seems to be based on these very values. And if somehow people do not attain the American Dream, we tend to think that they have not worked hard enough or did not save their money—in short, they are too much like drones. It could be argued that many American social policies—so conscious of work, labor, and time—are still based on the beehive model first adopted during the seventeenth century in England. For all its rhetoric of new opportunities, America still sees poverty as a sin, as if somehow the poor aren’t thrifty or busy as bees.

  This book is about how the honey bee has been perceived in America and how those perceptions have changed as the country developed through the centuries. Although the honey bee retains its religious importance in some American communities, it gradually has taken on secular values as America became industrialized. Thus, the book is arranged chronologically, for we trace the bee’s secularization and westward migration together. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the honey bee suggested even more ideas, such as freedom, political dissonance, and domestic dissatisfaction, as marginalized communities finally found expression in music, literature, and film. Furthermore, because there are many types of bees in North America, including solitary varieties, I will use the term “honey bee” to distinguish this insect from other, less social bees.

  Chances are, if you’ve read this far, you value esoteric information, and so you may enjoy thinking about subtle ways in which bees impact the American society. Keep reading. You may find that the simplest symbols that grace our banks, sidewalks, and billboards are far more complicated than you had ever imagined. You may hum a blues or gospel tune with a little more understanding of the complex sociological conditions from which the singer emerged. You may rethink your standing on social policies. You may even find yourself buying local honey and supporting regional beekeepers. The truth is, my goal has been much simpler: to provide enough evidence to serve as a valid response to Karl von Frisch’s question about the need for bee books. If I have provided enough evidence to convince you that there is always room for one more bee book, then this worker bee may rest.

  Chapter 1

  BEES AND NEW WORLD COLONIALISM

  If the Lord delights in us, then He will bring us into this land … a land which flows with milk and honey.

  —Numbers 14:8

  European settlers often quoted this biblical phrase to justify their colonization efforts. As long as settlers had cattle and bees, they could be assured of the basic essentials—food, wax, medicine, candles, and clothing. So powerful was the Bible verse that even though cattle and honey bees did not exist in North America, colonizers envisioned the New World as having them in the immediate future. But each European country handled its land acquisition in different ways. Whereas French and Spanish explorers conducted formal negotiations with Native Americans for land rights in the New World, the English settlers merely appropriated land that appeared unused. Summing up the English mind-set that land should be cultivated or else it was wasted, George Peckham states, “I doo verily think that God did create lande, to that end that it shold by Culture and husbandrie, yeeld things necessary for mans lyfe.”1 Because English settlers did not recognize or acknowledge Native American agricultural patterns already in place, they fundamentally changed the landscape by bringing cows, bees, apple trees, and even, inadvertently, mice.2 But the successful migration of bees, cattle, and the colonists themselves was not a foregone conclusion. In fact, the first attempts by English colonists to send bees to North America ended up in the Bermudas when a storm blew t
he Sea Venture off course in 1609.3 America could become a land of milk and honey, if bees and cows could survive the transatlantic journey and if the colonists themselves could survive the illnesses, difficult weather, and Native Americans.

  The first two English settlements—Jamestown and Plymouth—were not chosen wisely. Jamestown was settled in the middle of powerful Algonquian chief Powhatan’s domain. And the Mayflower, the ship carrying the Pilgrims, was blown off course from its initial destination of Virginia to the cold, rocky Massachusetts coast. So even though the English had been going to the colonies since 1609, neither place was suitable for bees until 1621. The reality of frontier America hardly lived up to the biblical promises of plenty assured by those back home, some of whom had never seen the New World.

  Colonists in both Jamestown and Plymouth died at an alarming rate from a number of different causes. At the end of Jamestown’s first year, 1607 to 1608, only 38 of the original 108 settlers were alive. “The winter of 1609 was the notorious starving time in Virginia,” Kupperman writes, “when the population dropped from 500 to sixty in six months.”4 Similarly, almost 50 percent of the Pilgrims died during their first year in Massachusetts.

  Leaders used the beehive metaphor to rally colonists’ spirits. Depression was not recognized as a sickness during the seventeenth century. But many Jamestown colonists, separated from England and suffering from malnutrition, were sick and indifferent. Furthermore, the Jamestown colony was made up only of men. Rather than being treated with sympathy, they were labeled as lazy or “idle drones.” Thinking that the cause was primarily a lack of leadership, Robert Gray wrote in 1609, “The Magistrate must correct with al sharpenesse of discipline those unthriftie and unprofitable Drones, which live idly.”5 Lord de la Warr, sent to Virginia in 1610 to provide leadership, managed to excuse himself from being labeled a “drone” in his summation of scurvy, but he admits that “which though in others it be a sicknesse of slothfulnesse, yet was in me an effect of weaknesse, which never left me, till I was upon the point to leave the world.”6

  Oblivious to titles and ranks, Captain John Smith often used the term drone to refer to all colonists, correctly realizing that men needed structure and activity if they were going to survive. Smith forced the early colonists to revise their new roles in the New World. Immediate goals helped dispel the gloom and low morale that resulted from lack of good, clear leadership and disappointment with the reality of frontier life. Believing that regular activities would keep his men healthy, Smith campaigned for the men to build houses and forts, clear land, take care of the sick, and garden.

  By 1621, the Virginia Company was sending ships loaded with “divers sorte of seed, and fruit trees, as also Pidgeons, connies [rabbits], Peacock maistives [mastiffs], and Beehives,” according to an invoice sent from the Council of the Virginia Company in London to the Governor and Council of Virginia.7 Clearly, the Virginia Company and Captain Smith recognized the importance of keeping their men active and not letting lethargy set in because, although depression was not recognized as a disease, idleness was the most-used term, which suggested moral failings. “Just as in the earlier Jamestown mortality,” according to Kupperman, “there was the conviction that the ‘mother and Cause’ of the contagious disease was ‘ill example of Idleness.’”8

  Whereas Jamestown was founded for commercial reasons, Plymouth was founded for religious reasons. The Pilgrims were a Protestant group convinced that the Church of England was impossibly corrupt. They were one small fraction of a larger group called the Puritans, who believed that the Church of England should be the official church, only “purified.” However, many Pilgrims finally came to believe, according to Kupperman, that “only cutting the colony off from supervision from England could allow it to begin to create an improved version of English society.”9 Thus the Pilgrims and Puritans differed in terms of their decision to stay in England. The Puritans chose to stay in England longer. But in order to practice their form of Protestantism, the Pilgrims left England. After waiting in Holland for years, the Pilgrims were even more determined to succeed in North America. The Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower bound for Virginia, but as stated earlier, the ship was blown off course and landed at Plymouth Rock.

  Forming a joint-stock company with London Merchants, a company willing to finance the Pilgrims’ venture to the New World, the Pilgrims themselves represented a share of stock. “The colonists were to work for the company for seven years, at the end of which they were to receive title to the land and all other assets were to be liquidated in accordance with stock ownership,” explains William Sachs.10 In contrast to Jamestown, whose inhabitants did not own shares, the Pilgrims were the investment in the New World. Later, when the Puritans organized the Massachusetts Bay Colony, top management leaders such as John Winthrop decided to relocate to America. Absentee management was not the problem at Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay Colony that it had been in Jamestown.

  Another major difference separated the Massachusetts Bay Colony from Jamestown and Plymouth. The Massachusetts Bay Colony sent more than a thousand colonists and thus ensured that the colony would have a good reserve of morale, workers, and adequate resources from which to begin. In this way, the English clergyman Richard Eburne writing in 1624 was correct in comparing colonists to bees: “The smallest swarms do seldom prosper, but the greatest never lightly fail.”11

  Because the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonists brought their families with them, the psychological effects of colonization seem to have been tempered earlier than in Jamestown, an issue that Kupperman addresses: “The key to getting people to work together on common goals, paradoxically, was to allow them to work for themselves and their families…. Families, made possible by the emigration of women, rendered individual efforts meaningful; passing an estate on to one’s children was the goal of hard work and deferred gratification.”12 This combination of theological, financial, and familial interests was never realized by other commercial ventures interested only in how much money could be made in America. In fact, when it was theorized that the colonists would be susceptible to Indian attacks, colonist William Wood refuted that notion. Wood realized that colonists who have property to protect would band together: “When Bees have Honie in their Hives, they will have stings in their tailes.”13

  Massachusetts also had a number of different economic options besides tobacco, including timber, fishing, and shipping. Sachs estimates that from 1630 to 1640, an estimated 20,000 immigrants arrived in Boston to carry on the work of building ships, fishing the Atlantic, and finding timber for ship masts and naval yards.14 When trade opened with the West Indies and southern Europe, business boomed in Boston. Yet even though the strong Pilgrim and Puritan religious communities tempered the emotional effects of colonization, the same fear of idleness pervaded Puritan and Pilgrim writings. Massachusetts governor John Winthrop sadly wrote to his wife, “I thinke here are some persons who never shewed so much wickednesse in England as they have doon here.”15

  Not all were wicked. In fact, because most colonial women married, the term good wife came into existence, around which developed a code of ethics that governed female life in northern New England from 1650 to 1750. Good wives had legal rights in colonial America and had more freedom than nineteenth-century women had. They often shouldered the responsibilities of farms and shops when men were away at sea or on trips. Deputy husbands was another term given to wives who learned their husbands’ trades. “Since most productive work was based within the family,” writes Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “there were many opportunities to ‘double the files of her [a wife’s] diligence.’ A weaver’s wife … might wind quills. A merchant’s wife … might keep shop. A farmer’s wife … might plant corn.”16 It could be just as likely that a baker’s wife would visit a hive if honey were needed to bake, by extension. Certainly, according to scholar David Freeman Hawke, the colonist’s wife “still performed a number of fixed duties as in England—prepared meals, milked cows, washed clothes,
tended to the kitchen garden and the beehives if the family had them. But her role was no longer limited to household chores … she now became the husband’s partner in the fields.”17 When the English colonies merged with New Amsterdam in 1664, the term good wife took on even more possibilities because Dutch women had more freedom than English women, and their inventories of kitchen gardens mentioned beehives.

  Settlers cherished the image of the beehive for the stability and order that they couldn’t enjoy in their home countries, and when they began to prosper, they “hived off” to form new communities.18 In Massachusetts, colonists created structured, organized societies based on English township patterns: “In the middle was the common, with the main streets running around this rectangle. Nearby the townsmen built their church, adjoining the minister’s house and church school. Each settler was given a home lot, which varied from a quarter of an acre to twenty acres, where he might plant an orchard and put in a small garden. Not far outside the village each colonist was assigned a strip of land for cultivation.”19 This arrangement made it easy for English communities to plan communal agricultural activities, such as harvesting, planting, and sowing.

  In order to hive off in the North American colonies, village leaders followed a process similar to England. A community petitioned the general court in Massachusetts for permission to send settlers to a new site: “Those designated to migrate would, on the appointed day, set forth to the new location under the directions of a few leading citizens authorized to supervise the journey. On arrival at the specified site, each family was again allocated a home lot, a strip of arable land, and the privileges of the common.”20 Because honey was an important commodity, many towns included plans for an apiary after orchards were planted. An Englishman named William Blackstone immigrated in 1623, bringing a bag of apple seeds with him. He planted these seeds on Beacon Hill, Boston, but they did very poorly. The Puritans remembered that the orchards in Europe had honey bees, and thus, they requested that bees be sent. The bees soon arrived and thrived. So did the apple trees. When Blackstone moved to Rhode Island, he took his seeds with him.21