Bees in America Read online

  Yet no records exist that suggest Africans became beekeepers upon their arrival in the New World, although thousands of slaves were brought to the colonies during the seventeenth century, and even more during the eighteenth century. They would have had to adjust to a different kind of honey bee. However, given the agrarian nature of colonial life, slaves would have had to use the products of honey bees, and in later centuries, their ancestors would appropriate the image to make their own comments about American life in their literature and music.

  For many Native American tribes, America was never a biblical land of milk and honey. America was nonetheless a complex, interwoven economic continent in which tribes engaged in trade with other tribes in order to supplement their needs. It was a highly formalized and centralized continent, in which “the [tribal] links are apparent in the spread of raw materials and finished goods, of beliefs and ceremonies, and of techniques of food production and for manufacturing.”51 Corn, beans, and squash—often called the three sisters—provided the basic diet. Salt, fish, and venison were other important commodities among the American Indians. Maple syrup was the primary sweetener, so Indians did not need honey.

  However, the Eastern Woodland Indians had cultivated forests and farmlands that enabled European plants and insects such as the honey bee to thrive in the new continent. Historian Stephen Potter describes the slash-and-burn techniques that many Algonquian tribes used to control underbrush and weeds: “The Algonquians prepared their fields by girdling the trees near the roots and then scorching the trunks with fire to prevent any further growth.”52 Once dead, many large trees were cut down, but many were also left standing. Thus, the remaining stands were perfect hives for the honey bees that survived the Atlantic crossing.

  Few records of Indian reactions to honey bees exist from this time period. As previously mentioned, the Swedes brought black bees (also known as German bees) with them in 1638. These bees are mean-tempered, even by today’s standards, and so it is little wonder that the Indians associated the black bees with the bullets used in the settlers’ guns.53

  In a popular story told in Massachusetts, Indians were able to see that Europeans used the honey bee as a symbol of hard work and industry. Bee historian Frank Pellett recorded a tale that goes something like this: “When the Massachusetts colony was first beginning, a little story is told of a local Indian, who curiously observed the bees at work. He had seen the horse, and ox—animals previously unknown to him and his people. He marveled that they should toil at the command of the settler. The honey bee was also a stranger, and the situation seemed to have become serious. ‘Huh! White man work, make horse work, make ox work, now make fly work; this Injun go away.’”54 In this story, the Native American is not characterized as “idle,” but neither does he value industry as the English define it. Even though Indians would incorporate honey into their diet and trade, they were not prolific honey producers. They never accepted the rhetoric of being “busy as a bee,” although Thomas Morton was one of the few that compared the Native American methods of food storage to that of the “industrious ‘Ant and Bee.’”55 This tale was an early indication of the major difference in value systems. With the beehive model still being a formative influence in the seventeenth century English social philosophies, the colonists modeled their settlements on the principles of industry and thrift—not wanting to waste time, money, or energy. However, Indians, who were not beekeepers and who had not been subjected to various amounts of literature about honey bees, did not restructure their societies to accommodate the disciplined work schedules or labor divisions of the English. The resulting stereotypes the English developed about Native Americans, then, suggested moral flaws in Native Americans that were false, but that justified poor treatment of the Indian people and their lands.

  Although North American plants that provided pollen were widely scattered, colonial honey bees did well. In fact, according to Alfred Crosby, “The immigrant insects did as well or better than the Europeans themselves in seventeenth century British America.”56 The colonists brought German bees, which were used to cold temperatures in Russia, Poland, Scandinavia, Germany, France, and the British Isles. The temperatures in North America were comparable to those regions, and thus the bees did well. There also was a variety of nectar and pollen-producing plants: maple, elm, blackberry, tulip tree, basswood, sumac, tupelo gum, goldenrod, aster.57

  Colonial honey bees could be found in three types of shelters: straw skeps, bee gums, or bee trees. As a result of Eastern Woodland Indian agricultural practices, the North American forests contained healthy stands. “Many woodlands in North America then contained mature trees with large cavities in which bees could nest, and honey hunting was common,” states Crane.58 Black gum trees were especially prone to leaving strong cavities once the tree died, and thus, the term bee gum developed. A bee gum is defined as a colony that lives in a hollow log.

  Using straw skeps, the English colonists brought German bees, or the “dark bees,” to the New World in 1621. In terms of storing the bee colonies for the voyage across the Atlantic, there are few records. But according to Crane, the voyage would have taken six to eight weeks. Quoting an 1830 book that described how cargo from Antwerp was arranged, Edward Goodell provides a good description: “[The hives] were placed on deck as follows: A strong oak platform was built on the stern of the ship, the crate containing the skeps was securely bolted to this platform facing the sea at the rear of the ship. This kept the bees as far as possible from the ship’s crew, and passengers, so that both could go about their business, neither interfering with the other.”59 The bees were brought in straw skeps, which had several advantages. Bees could stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer. The skeps could also be transferred easily: the early seventeenth-century models had handles on them.

  1.6. Bee gum, courtesy of Berea College Appalachian Museum. Early bee hives in America were called “gums” because black gum trees tended to decay from the interior quickly. This form of beekeeping was practical for frontiers-people, but was banned by the twentieth century in favor the Langstroth hive, which was considered more sanitary.

  Until sugarcane became an established commodity in the Barbados and the American colonies, honey was an important sweetener, medicinal liquid, and brewing agent in the colonies for the same reasons it was important to England.60 “Maple sugar and sirup, honey and molasses were the only sweetening agents that might be generally available,” explains historian Everett Oertel. “Of these only honey could be used without some form of processing.”61 Furthermore, according to Jordan and Kaups, honey supplemented the frontier diet with a “high-energy food at a sensitive and vulnerable time of the year, the spring.”62 Candles also were a necessity in frontier America. Beeswax was the preferred material because of its odorless and smokeless flame. It was a pleasant alternative to cow tallow, bear tallow, or whale oil.

  But Crane asserts that the American beekeeping practices were more primitive than those skills that had been used for thousands of years in the Mediterranean.63 While very sophisticated hives were being developed in England, colonists were content to keep bees in gum stands or straw skeps.64 In fact, eighteenth-century historian Ann Withington verifies the unsanitary agrarian practices: “Englishmen who traveled in America expressed their horror at the wastefulness and backwardness of American farmers.”65

  These primitive practices had a price. Eric Nelson speculates that after 1670 beekeeping declined because of American foulbrood.66 American foulbrood was and remains a contagious bee disease. Spore-forming bacteria cause it, and the bacteria can remain inactive for as long as thirty years in the hive and on equipment. Under the right circumstances, the spore will be become active when bee larvae are three days old or younger. The larvae will eat the spore. The spore then grows like a mold, consuming the larvae. The bees recognize the dead larvae and try to clean out the hive, but in the process of cleaning, the healthy bees spread the bacteria. The only known control until the twentieth cen
tury was to burn the hives and bees. Although it had been a worldwide problem for beekeepers, including those arriving from England in the seventeenth century, American scientists figured out the cause of the organism once microscopes were invented. However, during the colonial period, American foulbrood swept up and down the Atlantic coast quickly.

  Nonetheless, legal documents verify that honey and beeswax were important commodities in the colonies. Because hard money was in short supply and was often sent back to England to pay for agricultural wares, colonists often used “country pay,” in which farm commodities were used to barter for living essentials.67 Honey fit into the “country pay” category. Villages ensured that honey would be part of the economy. As previously mentioned, Newbury and Danvers had their own apiaries, and even Jamestown enjoyed a cottage industry in beekeeping by 1648.68

  The value of honey often depended on the coin denominations of the colonies’ motherlands. For instance, Delaware colonists traded in terms of Swedish dalers and skillings. The French would trade in livres, sous, and deniers, and the English in pounds, shillings, and pence sterling.69Peter Force’s “Tracts on Virginia” reported in 1650 that honey was sold at 2 shillings a gallon and beeswax at 4 shillings per hundred pounds.70 Colonists in Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Connecticut left beeswax and/or bee gums to their children or family relations in their wills.71

  Even though American foulbrood was a problem at the end of the seventeenth century, bees continued to swarm in America. Both by natural dispersal and by colonists, the honey bees went west along the waterways, which at the time extended to North Carolina, Georgia, and finally, during the early eighteenth century, Kentucky and western Pennsylvania.72

  The foremost bee historian Eva Crane once remarked that before the 1800s there was very little to be appreciated in American beekeeping.73 Colonial beekeeping was remarkable, however, because of how pervasive English ideas about bees, especially drones, were applied to colonists. In both Jamestown and Massachusetts, the biblical ideas associated with honey were incredibly important to helping early settlers deal with depression and homesickness. The biblical promise gave colonists hope that North America would give them what Europe could not: land, a second chance, a church of one’s own. Once colonists owned land, they appreciated the economic opportunities not afforded them in England.

  Furthermore, the American colonies contained diverse communities. Bees fit in well with Massachusetts governor John Winthrop’s vision of a “City upon a Hill,” a place where Christian values merged with the Puritan work ethic to create a culture in which industry and efficiency would equal financial reward and respect. The Swedes, the Africans, the Native Americans, the Germans—all complicate the picture of colonial New England being a “new Canaan,” however. While some groups were proficient beekeepers, other groups did not define industry, associated with the beehive, as a social virtue. The beehive rhetoric, which was impressed on the white Judeo-Christian communities in Europe and during the first stages of New World settlement, was difficult to comprehend by those people who were not English. Unfair land acquisition, poor treatment, disenfranchisement—that is, the real consequences of the beehive rhetoric—were easier to understand and would have disastrous consequences for those not welcome in the City upon a Hill.

  Part Two

  ESTABLISHING A NEW COLONY

  Chapter 2

  BEES AND THE REVOLUTION

  The bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers. The Indians therefore call them the white man’s fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlements of the whites.

  —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785

  Eighteenth-century America is noted for three interrelated but complex processes: European immigration, frontier migration, and political independence from England. Just as eighteenth-century American society was an intersection of ethnicities, so too was the honey bee a symbol for intersecting, and at times conflicting, values. European immigration had continued unabated since 1683. Anxious to throw off the yoke of state-sponsored religions, many Protestant groups—Moravians, Quakers, Lutherans, Separatists—continued to arrive from Germany and England. These European immigrants brought beekeeping skills. As they continued westward from Pennsylvania into Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, they took their skeps and bee gums with them.

  Although many immigrants kept bees in straw skeps, many frontiersmen were honey hunters. North America offered vast, healthy forests with few government restraints. Even Native Americans incorporated beeswax and honey into the frontier barter system that existed between slaves, French traders, and English, German, and Dutch settlers. Two writers of diverse backgrounds—Moravian missionary David Zeisberger and Louisiana plantation owner Antoine Le Page du Pratz—wrote journals documenting the existence of bee trees and white-Indian exchanges.

  Although these trade patterns were interrupted during the Revolutionary period, the honey bee was an important symbol for moderation in the emerging American society. The Poet of the American Revolution, Philip Morin Freneau, wrote a poem in which a honey bee needs to learn restraint, offering a veiled lesson to the Americans just acquiring freedom from England. Frenchman John Crèvecoeur wrote a pastoral in which America, “the most perfect society,” closely resembles an industrious hive. Other documents featuring a hive symbol, such as money or calling cards, were widely distributed throughout the colonies both before and after the American Revolution. “Image makers used the visual media for numerous political purposes,” explains Lester Olson, “many of which had little to do with overtly picturing the nation as a body politic but nonetheless contributed to the creation of a body politic by inculcating a revolutionary mentality.”1 The 1779 Philadelphia Continental Congress adopted the bee skep on its currency, and after the war, social clubs used the beehive image to promote order and organization. In general, eighteenth-century America depended on a variety of inextricable and intertwined networks, and from the colonists’ perspective, the bee was a benign symbol connecting them.

  Although bees had already begun swarming west, pioneers carried hives and social customs involving bees into new territory, primarily along established water routes. Colonel James Harrod was one of the first people to bring honey bees into Kentucky in 1780, but bees had already existed in the Appalachians before his arrival. According to noted beekeeper George W. Demaree, “Kentucky in her early history was famous on account of her wonderful forests. In those days many persons kept bees in tall log gums and boxes, and the bees succeeded in propagating the species and bearing up under the disadvantages imposed on them by their ignorant keepers in a manner which would put the best of the races to blush under like treatment at the present day.”2 Frontier people embraced the bee skep image nonetheless. A cabinet made during this time period in Kentucky features a bee skep in its center.3

  Named in honor of King George III, a new English colony was established in 1733 by Perceval, Oglethorpe, and Associates. Georgia had a twofold purpose, according to historian William Sachs: “The colony was to serve as an armed buffer zone against the Spanish in Florida and as a place where debtors could be given a fresh start.”4 By the time the Moravians moved to Savannah, they found that bee trees were already there. By 1770, honey bees had spread to Natchez, Mississippi.5 According to historian Everett Oertel, wild honey bees were already established in Alabama by 1773.6

  Furthermore, records suggest that bees had been established in Florida at least as early as 1764. The Spanish Governor of Louisiana Antonio de Ulloa kept extensive journals of his tenure from 1766 to 1768. When Spain ceded Florida to England in 1763, many Spanish inhabitants moved to Havana, Cuba. According to Ulloa, these Florida exiles took their hives with them, “which they set up in Guanavacoa and in some ranches as objects of curiosity; the latter multiplied so swiftly that they spread throughout the hills and it was learned that they were beginning to damage the plantations of sugar
cane on which they lived.”7 Before arriving in Louisiana, Ulloa had lived in Cuba from 1764 to 1765 and had thus witnessed firsthand the rapid dispersal of bees. In fact, he continued to predict that “each bee hive swarmed once a month, sometimes twice; the one regular size, the other smaller, … and in the wax and honey taken out there were no less abundant than is the case here [Spain], where this phenomenon occurs only once or twice a year.” Ulloa suggested that honey bees could be “advantageous for the national trade,” provided, of course, that bees would not replace sugar cane as the main commodity.8

  Farther north, Pennsylvania had already adopted the bee as its symbol of thrift and industry. And for good reason. By 1771, 29,261 pounds of beeswax were exported from Philadelphia.9 Many of the German immigrants were skeppists, and their social customs involved bees as well. When a beekeeper died, the Germans believed that the bees must be told. According to folklorist Lester Breininger, the German phrase is “Won en eama mon starbed, mus ebber die eama ricka,” or “When a beekeeper dies, someone must inform the bees.”10 If the bees were not told, they would either leave or die.