Bees in America Read online

  The English also brought variations of this custom to the colonies. According to folklorist Wayland Hand, “The announcement of death is made verbally, either in a loud voice, as in New Hampshire, or by whispering, as in Suffolk, Leicester, Rutland, and Kentucky.” The verse sung in New Hampshire should be rhymed: “Bees, bees, awake! / Your master is dead, / And another you must take.”11 This tradition, according to twentieth-century writer J. E. Crane in Bee Culture, must have had its roots in the simple fact that bee colonies might be neglected after the beekeeper’s death.12 Another social custom associated with a death in the family is a process known as “ricking.”13 The eldest son would move the beehive slightly to the right; this movement would signal to the bees that the universe had changed, ever so slightly. In some regions, people dressed the hives in black mourning fabric. Bees were thought to be averse to profanity and quarreling families. “Quarreling about bees also keeps them from prospering,” according to Hand, and “these same beliefs are found in Ontario, upper New York State, and in Maryland.”14

  Many pastors were beekeepers, often supplying their own wax for religious ceremonies or using honey to supplement their incomes or diets. Reverend Noah Atwater provided one of the first journals about his garden in Westfield, Connecticut. He recorded swarming patterns and made metheglin (fermented honey wine).15

  Metheglin (a type of mead) is a beverage handed down from medieval Druids, but it was just as welcome to farmers in eighteenth-century America. Pennsylvanian historian Breininger provides an updated recipe: “To some new honey, add spring water, three parts water and one part honey. Put an egg into this. Boil the liquor till the egg swims. Strain, pour into a cask. For every fifteen gallons add two ounces of ginger and one of cinnamon, cloves, and mace, all bruised and tied up in a sack. Accelerate the fermentation with yeast. When worked sufficiently, bung up. In six weeks, it should be drawn off into bottles.”16 Mead, honey, and beeswax were all items that Reverend Atwater used in his home and village. Because Atwater routinely gave up part of his salary to help the poor in his town, he may have supplemented his income or diet by the honey and wax taken from the bees.

  The English, French, Spanish, and Indians engaged in extensive trading and bartering on the frontier. According to L. R. Stewart, “In 1793, on Black River (lower Wabash), a French trapper, Pierre De Van, came upon a party of Indians and two white captives … and all were carrying vessels of different kinds filled with honey.”17 Stewart also documents that Indians used propolis for waterproofing canoes, honey for cooking, and beeswax for barter.

  The Moravians recorded the honey and beeswax trade with Indians with fastidious detail. The Moravians, a pacifist group, immigrated to America when they could no longer practice their religion freely in Germany. They refused to take oaths to any political government. They also embraced celibacy and the divine lot system, believing that God was ultimately in charge of all decisions, including whom one should marry. During worship, they used the purest materials available, and thus in 1747, their American ceremonies had to have beeswax. Candles were a mainstay in their worship practices.

  As business people, Moravians were ethical. Products were produced and sold at cost, which worked well in the manorial system of Germany and in frontier America. Because Moravian communities distinguished themselves by their pacifist stances and piety, their sponsor, Count Ludwig von Zinzindorf, had no difficulty obtaining charters to establish colonies in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Mission work was always a high priority among the Moravians. Much of the best missionary work done with Indians was done by the American Moravians in the eighteenth century. In their journals, Moravians recorded bee trees, trade negotiations, and the changing frontier.

  In Georgia, for instance, Moravians wanted to educate slaves and Indians near Savannah. En route to visit the Indians, Commissary von Reck and Reverend Bolzius found honey in some bee trees; they used it along with “Parrots and Partridges,” which “make us here a very good dish.”18 The missionaries were not content with the results of their attempts at converting blacks or Indians, however. Georgia plantation owners did not want their slaves to be taught to read and write, nor did they want the slaves converted to Christianity. The ever-present threat of a Spanish invasion from Florida was also a problem. So the Moravians abandoned the Georgia settlement and relocated to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Salem, North Carolina.

  The Moravian colony in North Carolina was more successful than the one in Georgia. The Moravians quickly established a thriving town with woodworking industries, farms, and pubs. They maintained peace in spite of the animosity between the North Carolina backwoodsmen and British Tories in the region. Historian Hunter James describes the potential for conflict on the North Carolina pre-Revolutionary frontier:

  Most of the men and women who had settled on the Carolina frontier had come south looking for cheap land and a chance to be free of the galling restraints—the boundary disputes, high consumer costs, high taxes, and overweening crown authorities—that had plagued them in the North [Pennsylvania]. The Moravians, however, had come for different reasons: for cheap land, yes, but also to live as a “quiet people,” to conduct themselves peaceably at whatever cost, and to spread their gospel throughout the length and breadth of a region that had known the footsteps of few hunters and trappers and fewer missionaries.19

  By providing supplies such as candles, beeswax, and hives to Tories and settlers alike at reasonable prices, the Moravians managed to strike a balance between the Tories and the settlers. A case in point: British Governor William Tryon. An aristocrat, William Tryon was “the unwitting embodiment of just about everything the [American] backswoodsmen despised in their British overlords.”20 However, Governor Tryon had a very good opinion of the Moravians because they refused to join any of the riots, which began the buildup to the events of the 1770s. On one visit in 1767, Tryon ordered 478 pounds of candles, 150 pounds of butter, 6 beehives, 3 bushels of rye, a gun, and even a windmill.21

  After the Revolution, Moravians expanded westward into the Ohio frontier, establishing missions in both Gnadenhutten, Ohio, and Schoenbrunn, Illinois. Although the landscape was filled with bee trees aplenty, Ohio was bloody and violent ground. The Moravians were in territory disputed by the Indians, British, French, and American forces. Trying to strike an uneasy balance between these forces was a young Moravian named David Zeisberger, who had been trained in Savannah, Georgia.22 He had studied the Mohawk languages with Christopher Pyrleaus.23 Attuned to the subtle changes taking place in American culture and landscape, Zeisberger recorded many Indian-colonist exchanges in the eighteenth century and even passed information to American soldiers about British movements. Of all the men on the Ohio frontier, he was best poised to see the most potential for Native American-Christian communities and best understood the far-reaching implications when that potential backfired.

  In 1775, after extensive negotiations, Zeisberger had convinced the Delaware Indians to become Moravian Christians. In 1776, he called for those Christian Indians who were living in Gnadenhutten and Schoenbrunn to move to Lichtenau, the “pasture of light.” Although these missions had been thriving and the crops were close to harvest, the Moravians and Delaware Christians left, bringing the cattle. With his missions consolidated in Lichtenau, Zeisberger could see his ideal vision within reach: “A different spirit rules among the Indians. We have seen many who in times past, were our bitter enemies and would neither hear nor know anything of God’s Word and now show themselves to be very obliging and confiding toward us.”

  But the American Revolution broke out, and “unfortunately for the Christian Indians, their villages and missions lay between the hostile British and their allies and the Americans,” explains Ohio historian R. Douglas Hurt.24 In 1778, the non-Delaware Indians strengthened their alliance with British forces. In 1781, the British decided to move the Moravians to the Sandusky, where the commandant at Detroit, Major Arent Schuyler De Peyster, could be sure that the Moravians were no
t giving information to the American troops. The move to the fort proved disastrous for the Indians. While in transit, Zeisberger wrote, “We felt the power of darkness, as if the air was filled with evil spirits.” In 1782, with his people close to starvation, Zeisberger agreed that some of the Delaware Christians could return to Gnadenhutten to harvest the crops they had left in the fields.

  More than ninety Delaware Moravians were picking corn in Gnadenhutten on March 8, 1782, when a Pennsylvania militia rode up. When the militia called to the Indians to leave the fields, the Delaware went willingly into the houses. The militia began to slaughter them. The Indians sang hymns throughout the massacre: “The militiamen took the Indians in groups of two or three to the two cabins that served as slaughterhouses, made them kneel, and smashed their skulls with a cooper’s mallet, not unlike the way they would kill oxen or hogs.”25

  Zeisberger stayed in Ohio after the Gnadenhutten massacre, but sadness pervaded his outlook from then on. Perhaps concerned about the Delaware Indians, who were always hungry once their lands were signed away, Zeisberger mentions honey and bee trees frequently in his later diaries. In 1786, he mentions that the Cuyahoga River at the mouth of Lake Erie had bee trees: “The bush swarms with bees.”26 By 1792, a Moravian missionary settlement of Delaware Indians was established in Fairfield (east of Detroit, now in Kent County, Ontario).27 In an entry dated June 27, 1793, Zeisberger mentions two hives of bees brought there from a Moravian mission in Ohio by Indian Peter (Chief Echpalawchund).28

  Zeisberger, a courageous man placed in difficult circumstances, died with regret. Although he genuinely believed an Edenic paradise could be found in America, he had seen many Indians succumb to European diseases, massacres, starvation, and alcoholism in spite of the Moravians’ efforts to help them adapt to Christian religion and customs. His diaries are one of the best resources to study how valiantly a missionary tried to document America as the biblical land of milk and honey, even as its promise failed repeatedly.

  Honey bees were in Tennessee as well; they were one of the reasons why Moravians Abraham Steiner and F. C. von Schweinitz found that region so attractive. They reported that pioneers on Judge McNairy’s plantation had burned forty swarms of wild bees, which had settled on the garden fence and begun to rob their tame bees in September 1798.29

  The military also recorded the subtle changes in the landscape and the Native American adaptation to them. Although peach trees were not indigenous to America, the Cherokee tribes readily adopted them. When Colonel Benjamin Hawkins traveled across Tennessee in 1796, he noted the Cherokee had “peach trees and potatoes as well as native corn and beans, and some had bees and honey and did a considerable trade in beeswax.”30

  We learn from existing missionary and military records that Indians incorporated bee trees and honey into their trade and diet patterns very quickly. Perhaps they did so to participate in the barter system. Perhaps they did so because their lands were signed away, and they could no longer count on the traditional “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash—to sustain them through the difficult winters. We do not have written records documenting precise reasons why, but when describing the complex food and fur trade exchange economy in the Lower Mississippi Valley, historian Daniel H. Unser Jr. explains the importance of the complex barter systems during the eighteenth century: “When one follows the movement of deerskins and foodstuffs through this network, the importance of small-scale trade among diverse groups of people comes into focus.”31 Unser’s research legitimizes trade among frontier communities that kept few account ledgers and balance sheets, privileging cultural values more than money or wampum. Even though the Indians may have initially thought of the honey bee as the white man’s fly, it had become their fly too.

  Ironically, more documents exist about Indians and honey bees than about blacks and honey bees, even though Africa had enjoyed a rich tradition of honey hunting. German historian Carl Seyffert’s 1930 book, Bees and Honey in Africa, was published after World War I, but he documented colonial beekeeping traditions in African countries, such as Ethiopia, Senegal, Angola, and Gambia. Eva Crane, condensing Seyffert’s work as well as translating his sources, begins her chart with an explorer named Alvarez, who described Ethiopia in 1576 as “the whole land … overflowing with honey.”32 In 1602, Pierre de Marees recorded honey bees in a tree nest in Guinea. “There is much honey in the forest,” Samuel Braun wrote in 1625 about Angola, and the bees “make honey and wax from many sweet plants.”33 Because Africans from all of these countries were shipped to America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I suggest that they brought their honey hunting skills with them, although I have been unable to find records to prove this link.

  West African slaves were especially important to the still-struggling American colonies. In South Carolina, slaves had rice skills that were necessary on plantations.34 So many slaves from Angola were brought into Louisiana that d’Iberville named his plantation after the West African country. Even in New York, the “Dutch Colonial” house owners depended on slave labor to quarry the stones and cut the timber.35 The proprietors of New Jersey granted farmers 75 acres for every slave brought into the colony. With so many slaves from West Africa, America was “a nation within a nation” by 1706, according to scholar Margaret Washington.36

  And yet the only reliable American narrative documenting the importance of honey in Africa is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789). Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, was born in Nigeria in 1745 and sold as a slave to a ship captain in the British Royal Navy.37 Although there is evidence to suggest that he was really born in South Carolina, Equiano provides an important portrait of pre-slave trade Africa in his narrative: “Our land [Africa] is uncommonly rich and fruitful, and produces all kinds of vegetables in great abundance. We have plenty of Indian corn, and vast quantities of cotton and tobacco. Our pineapple grow without culture; they are about the size of a large sugar-loaf, and finely flavored. We have also spices of different kinds, particularly pepper; and a variety of delicious fruits which I have never seen in Europe; together with gums of various kinds, and honey in abundance.”38 Most probably compiled from oral narratives, Equiano’s narrative nonetheless documents that many slaves in America used honey in their African diets and gift-giving rituals.

  American slaves often made candles. Although everyday candles were made from a variety of substances (such as tallow, sperm oil, and bay-berry), beeswax was the preferred material for candles used during important celebrations. An important rice plantation in South Carolina, Middleton Place (built in 1741), indicates that, in its task system, three slave women made beeswax and bear tallow candles throughout the year. Middleton Place was a showpiece among the colonial elite, and beeswax candles would have been used for its elaborate ceremonies.

  Farther north in Virginia, George Washington, another slave owner, had hives on his plantation. Martha Washington reputedly liked rose-flavored honey. The following is a recipe provided by the estate: one should bring a cup of mild-flavored honey to a boil in a heavy saucepan. Turn off the heat as soon as the honey starts to foam up. Stir in half a cup of fresh rose petals. Let the mixture sit for four hours. Bring to a boil again. Pour through a strainer and discard the petals.39

  Farther west, French Louisiana had plenty of bees and an extensive food network that brought together whites, blacks, Cajuns, Creoles, and Indians. In his journal, Antoine Le Page du Pratz, director of the Chapitoulas sugarcane plantation in Louisiana, allowed his slaves to supplement their diets by harvesting their crops to sell at the local food markets. He was so pleased with his slaves’ participation in the food markets that he highly recommended that other directors let their slaves have small plots of land, known as concessions.40 Slaves were able to sell their extra produce and gain a small degree of autonomy from their owners. Nor were concessions limited to just a few slaves. According to Daniel Unser, “Many of the several thousand African slaves shipped to Louisiana during the 17
20s to expand the commercial agriculture turned to small-scale cultivating and marketing of foodstuffs.”41

  When Louisiana became a state in 1812, American authorities cracked down on the slaves’ freedom in the markets. But they could not control the daily cross-cultural interactions that occurred between the Spanish, Indian, French, and Africans in the markets and on the El Camino Real (also known as the King’s Highway or the San Antonio Trail), a trade route that had been established since the 1500s.42 Because slave women were responsible for meals, they were a steady presence in the Louisiana food markets, buying and selling surplus items for their owners and themselves. “From these circumstances in the marketplace, not to mention those in the colonial kitchens,” Unser states, “came the heavy African influence upon Louisiana’s famous Creole cuisine.”43

  Furthermore, the El Camino Real was a major artery for travel and trade between Spanish Texas, the French town of Nacogdoches, and the Caddo villages on the Natchez during the seventeenth century. Begun first by the Apache and Tonkawa Indians in the 1500s, the Spanish used it to establish mission and trade posts in the 1700s. The best description about the complexity of this seemingly simple trade route is found in the Handbook of Texas Online: “Although generally thought of as one road, it may be more accurate to say it was a network of trails—different routes used at different times,” and I might add, by different peoples.44 Because many Africans could not read or write English, recipes were handed down orally. Census records indicate that slaves made candles, kept gardens, and cooked in the kitchen. These sparse records are a tenuous link between American slaves and their honey traditions in Africa. “Clearly, Indians did not just hunt, blacks did not just grow crops for export, and whites did not merely choose to become either subsistence farmers or staple planters,” states Unser.45