Bees in America Read online

  Even as these bee hunters were living off the land, settlers were changing the land in ways that would end bee hunting as a professional career. Plows meant that settlers would till up the prairie wildflowers, and trees were cut down to make houses. As the open range was enclosed for more refined cattle than the Texas longhorns, the pieces were in place for a beekeeping industry to develop later in the century. Bees and cattle had followed one another since Greek and Roman antiquity, and when the European settlers began invading North America, this formula did not change, although the unique nature of the American landscape did affect how bees and cattle would be kept. In the nineteenth century, settlers were still figuring out the vagaries of the Great Plains.

  In Southwest Texas, the cattle cradle had already formed when the Spanish left their cattle to run wild after their failed attempts to conquer and civilize Texas in their usual four-step fashion: conquest, mission, presidio, and pueblo.23 The Spanish, always greedy for gold, had not counted on fierce Plains Indians, and eventually, they abandoned their efforts at the end of the eighteenth century. While the Texas region underwent a series of political changes in the nineteenth century—a province, a republic, a state, and a confederate state—the Spanish longhorns reproduced and multiplied rapidly near San Antonio. This “cattle cradle” had water, shade, and forage materials. By the time Texas became an American territory in the 1840s, immigrant beekeepers from Germany were able to capitalize on the region’s abundant pollen and nectar supplies. The region seemed to fulfill biblical promises.

  Above the Plains, bee hunters and settlers mingled on the Missouri frontier. For many, a leisurely honey hunt was just the diversion needed from the hardships of frontier life. Of these, Dr. Josiah Gregg was the most famous. His Commerce of the Prairies advocated that honey hunts were good for one’s health.24 Although honey hunting could be beneficial to humans, more than a few honey hunters were unethical when it came to taking care of the frontier forests. They could be “a people less industrious than the insects which they destroy,” to quote nineteenth-century journalist Alphonso Wetmore.25 He claimed that Clinton County, Missouri, was filled with “church-going citizens—except when snake-killing and bee-hunting were in order.”26 In Harrison County, Missouri, whole neighborhoods would participate in honey-and wax-gathering expeditions.

  Conscientious pioneers were angry about the wastefulness of trees as early as 1821. Henry R. Schoolcraft, nineteenth-century Ojibwa scholar and friend to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote a particularly “scathing account of the manner in which two pioneers gobbled up handfuls of honey, sharing it the while with their hounds.”27 So, too, did Irving write about the “wasteful prodigality of hunters,” explaining that since the “surrounding country, in fact, abounded with game … the camp was overstocked with provisions, and no less than twenty bee trees had been cut down in the vicinity.”28 So many people participated in honey hunting that in 1837, Alphonso Wetmore “was concerned about the damage done to forests by bee hunters and tanners.” Daniel McKinley reports that eleven bee trees were required to make a barrel, and in one instance in July 1842, a party was able to take seven barrels of honey.29

  Reports of the plentiful bee trees in the Midwest abounded, however. In 1836, one man in Scotland County, Missouri, reported seeing seventy-five barrels of honey on its way to the market. George Combs found over 170 bee trees in his first season in Clark County.30 One group of settlers from Iowa found sixteen white oak trunks with bees in 1839.31 Beekeeping laws, which protected forests and honey hunters alike in Europe, were nonexistent on the frontier. Circumstances were right, then, for an old-fashioned feud to develop between Missouri and Iowa involving the felling of honey trees on the border.

  Dulce Et Decorum Est

  In 1839, the snow fell deep and blurred the unclear boundary between Iowa and Missouri.32 The ambiguity about the boundary had arisen from two different surveyor charts, specifically about where the rapids of the river Des Moines started. When the first surveyor went to chart the land, the river was at a normal level, and he used a series of the rapids where the Des Moines met the Mississippi to chart a boundary line. However, a second surveyor went when the river was higher, and when he wrote his report, the rapids appeared to start further north on the Des Moines River than where the first surveyor claimed the usual series of rapids were.

  The area was rich in wild game and bee trees, and when Missouri ordered another survey done, the surveyor decided to use the shallower rapids of the Des Moines river, instead of those that appeared where the Des Moines met the Mississippi. Doing so accomplished two things for Missouri: nice straight geographical lines, and more land.

  Iowans were not pleased.

  As timing would have it, two seemingly unrelated events happen at the same time. When a Missourian cut down three bee trees in the snowy disputed land territory, an Iowa court naturally ruled against him. In an unrelated incident, a Missouri sheriff named Uriah S. Sandy Gregory tried to collect taxes from Iowa people who were building houses in the disputed territory. He was chased out of town in short order.

  But these two incidents were enough to get Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs’s blood boiling. Boggs knew a thing or two about chasing people out of town: he later forced the Mormons out of Missouri, at gunpoint. He wouldn’t be outdone by a bunch of Iowans. Governor Boggs demanded that Sheriff Gregory go back to Iowa and collect taxes. When Gregory finally did so, Iowa Governor Robert Lucas declared an old-fashioned border war. That was fine by Boggs. To read Sue Hubbell’s description of the account, the soldiers in both armies were hardly the noble type: when ammunitions stores were closed, they broke in to steal weapons. When asked for volunteers, no one would step across the line, except for two inebriated men. It was December, after all. Both armies preferred that Congress decide where the border was.33 A truce was called, a decision was handed down, and when the final tab was calculated, both states had to pay more than they felt that they should have had to. The bee wrangler who started the feud, it seems, went unpunished.

  Small wonder, then, that even though Indian tribes adapted to the benefits of the hive, some still regretted the bees’ presence. When talking about the Osage Indians in the Missouri territory in 1836, Alphonso Wetmore “claimed that he was once at the Osage village near Papinville when the Indians held a day of mourning because a swarm of bees had been found.”34 It was a sure sign Indians would rapidly lose their way of life.

  The Great Awakening

  Civilizing a wilderness required great time and energy. When America finally stopped fighting the British, dealing (and in some cases double-dealing) with the French, and “bribing” the Indians, the country experienced a religious awakening, the effects of which still linger. The Great Awakening prompted a spurt of utopian communities, approximately 450 in all. Thomas More’s Utopia, written in England during the 1500s, promoted a community built on the principles of justice and peace. Ideally, the community would be classless, and everyone would live in relative comfort. Poverty would be eliminated if everyone worked. Nineteenth-century America provided the perfect circumstances for leaders willing to create a utopia, for America provided land, democracy, and unlimited natural resources.

  Because it is impossible for this book to provide a comprehensive discussion of all these societies, I will focus on the more prominent communities that directly or indirectly affected American beekeeping. In addition to the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearance (henceforth known as the Shakers), other religious utopian communities such as Harmonists, Icarians, and Mormons (now called the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints) depended on the honey bee either as a pragmatic foundation to an agrarian lifestyle or a religious icon.

  Although the Shakers had been in America since 1774, their communities struggled until the nineteenth century. After Shaker Elder Joseph Meacham wrote official guidelines in 1787, the Shakers agreed to communal living, equality between the sexes, and celibacy in order to focus on spiritual matters. Abov
e all, instead of a Holy Trinity, which many Protestant communities embraced, the Shakers believed in a divine duality that embraced both sexes—the male aspect of the Father and the female aspect of Wisdom.35 The Shakers believed that God was not found in an afterlife, but in the present activities of daily life.

  The Shakers’ radical beliefs regarding women and divinity meant that the Shakers were constantly harassed. They were beaten, jailed, and often run out of town. When the frontier started expanding west, the Shakers jumped at the opportunity to create communities in relative isolation from Protestant cities. Still, the Shakers were not unpatriotic in spite of their pacifist philosophies. One Shaker, Issachar Bates, credited George Washington with liberating the colonies from England because such autonomy afforded greater chances at religious toleration in the new country.36 By 1810, major Shaker communities had been established in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana, and all kept bees. In addition to the newer communities, the older, more established communities such as Canterbury, Mount Lebanon, Harvard, Sabbathday Lake, and Hancock kept bees in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

  Although all Shaker communities depended on agriculture, the Kentucky villages of Pleasant Hill and South Union took great pride in their apple orchards and were willing to experiment with imported bees, bee houses, and beehives. Bee houses were included in the community plans. Scholar Julia Neal writes of Pleasant Hill: “Around each family dwelling house were clustered numerous small dependencies, such as the butter house, the fruit-drying house, the chicken house, the woodhouse, the round bee house, and the silk house.”37

  Their efforts were not in vain. In 1834, two prominent Shaker leaders in the East—Isaac Newton Youngs and Rufus Bishop—decided to tour the villages in the West to observe the new experiments. They were treated like celebrities. In a travel journal written by Youngs, he writes of visiting John Smith’s bee house in South Union, Kentucky: “This was a curious site [sic] it had a round brick building two stories high and so constructed that one can go into the inside and see the bees to work in their places or boxes.”38 Interestingly enough, there were two John Smiths at the South Union village: one a respected leader, one an “absconder,” who drifted in and out for about twenty years before the Shakers lost patience with him. We don’t know which man was the beekeeper, but the journal entry shows that the Shakers borrowed vocabulary from the bee world (for example, absconding) to describe the various people who drifted into their communities.

  In a bee journal written by Giles B. Avery in 1851 to 1854, he recorded the daily trials and tribulations of working with bees and bee swarms in Lebanon, New York. The cold weather was certainly a factor, as was the amount of light in his bee house, causing bees to want to fly out when it was too cold or causing the hives to mold. Avery’s journal is a meticulous account written by a man gathering swarms in orchards, feeding his bees, and buying swarms from his neighbors (both Shakers and non-Shakers).39

  The image of a drone was used frequently in Shaker hymns. The Shakers borrowed Isaac Watts’s English 1655 hymn: “How doth the little busy bee, / Improve each shining hour” to encourage their fellow brethren to renounce earthly desires:

  Behold in spring see everything

  Alive and cloth’d with beauty

  Shall I alone an idle drone

  Be slothful in my duty?

  To gather honey see the Bee Fly

  Around from flower to flower

  A good example there for me

  To well improve each hour.40

  Because the Shakers believed that Christ had already come in the form of their leader, Mother Anne Lee, they refused to sing hymns celebrating an afterlife. Such messages, they felt, were misguided.

  In contrast to the Shakers, the Harmonians believed that Christ’s second coming was imminent. George Rapp, a dissident Lutheran, immigrated from Württemberg, Germany, to establish Harmony, Indiana, which emphasized communal prayer, music, and work. Rapp wanted to create communities that would be perfect models of Christian life, so that when Christ came back, Christ would be more pleased with the Harmonian societies.

  As with all frontier communities, honey bees served an important function in this community. Extensive bee skeps were located near the apple orchards, and wax was available in its stores for nearby residents.41 As a symbol of biblical importance, the honey bee served as a symbol of harmony, even though the community quickly fell into discord when Rapp fell in love with a very beautiful and very young woman.

  Amid controversy, George Rapp sold the Harmony community to the wealthy philanthropist Robert Owen, who promptly renamed it New Harmony. Owen had made millions in the English mill industry, but he wanted to start a socialist community. Knowledge, not religion, was his priority. Owen enticed the finest minds to come to America. Although the community ultimately failed because it was so disorganized, New Harmony made lasting contributions to American education and science. When entomology was just emerging in this country, a New Harmony resident Charles Alexander Leseur illustrated a bee tree to include in Thomas Say’s American Entomology, or Descriptions of the Insects of North America.42

  Of all the utopian communities in the nineteenth century, the Church of Latter-day Saints best illustrated the successful assimilation of religious beliefs and American ideals embodied in the honey bee. The prophet Joseph Smith, born in Palmyra, New York, received a vision from Moroni that extended Christianity to include American Indians. Having found gold plates containing hieroglyphics in his dream, he translated them into the Book of Mormon. Central to the Mormon religion is the honey bee, also called deseret in the Mormon language. Although other Masonic symbols, such as the all-seeing eye, the compass, and the sun, were important to Mormon pilgrims, none would permeate Mormon communities like the bee skep and the honey bee.

  3.2. Charles Alexandre Lesueur, title page for Thomas Say’s American Entomology, or Descriptions of the Insects of North America (1824). Courtesy of New Harmony Working Man’s Institute. This nineteenth-century illustration shows a bee tree sheltering a variety of American insects. The symbols of civilization are in the background; a steamer is in the distance. But in the foreground is a web of insects, starting with the bees, moving into spiders, drifting into butterflies and ants.

  When the Mormons followed Smith to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1838, they embarked on an exodus that kept them emigrating until they finally reached Utah in 1847. Through it all, the beehive was used in iconic fashion to help solidify Mormon identity. Smith’s bodyguards, called the Lifeguard Legion, had the skep emblazoned on their uniform buttons. Although the skep certainly embodied industry, it also meant collective safety to the Mormons.

  And for good reason. The Mormons were harassed just as the Shakers had been. In Illinois, an anti-Mormon mob lynched Smith and his brother while they were awaiting trial in a Carthage jail in 1844. Upon Governor Thomas Ford’s insistence, the Mormons fled Illinois bound for Utah, which was still a territory. They took bees with them. In fact, contemporary commercial beekeepers Russell and Norman Mitchell can claim a great-grandfather “who brought bees to Utah, strapped to the back of a covered wagon, with Brigham Young.”43 The Mitchell family descendants did not stay in Utah, preferring Idaho instead, but they did remain beekeepers.

  So did the Mormons. The bee skep became the image that alternately provided protection and encouragement for Mormons. In a popular song “The Busy Bees of Deseret,” the Mormons recorded the intense hatred that drove them to the Utah territory in 1848: “The busy bees of Deseret / Are still around their hives. / Though honey hunters in the world / Don’t wish these bees to thrive.”44 These bees did thrive, however, in part because of the extensive missionary system set up by Brigham Young when Utah was still a territory. He sent missionaries to recruit artists and skilled craftsmen from throughout the world. A good number of these new recruits were Danes, English, Welsh, and German.

  Governor Ford had been anxious to see the Mormons go, and he welcomed the French Icarians, led by Etienne Cabet, w
ho were considered some of the finest minds in Europe, being an eclectic mix of engineers, philosophers, and writers. Committed to a more perfect society, Cabet wanted Napolean to establish a French republic. Exiled for his beliefs when Louis Phillipe of Orleans was crowned king, Cabet went to England, where he read Owen’s tracts for New Harmony. Greatly influenced by Owen’s writings, Cabet wrote about a perfect communist society in a novel called The Voyage to Icaria (so named for Icarus, who flew too close to the sun). Cabet convinced French civilians deluded with Napoleon Bonaparte III’s efforts in France to follow him to America.

  The first group of Icarians, sixty-seven men, landed first in Texas and made their way to present-day Dallas. According to M. G. Dadant, “The type of men in the party hardly warranted stopping in such a place where no cultivation had as yet been attempted. They had but one farmer in the lot of 67.”45 Predictably, many of their company soon perished, and they relocated to New Orleans. From there, Cabet appealed to Governor Ford (who had just threatened to exterminate any remaining Mormon in Nauvoo, Illinois) for a safer, more civilized place to relocate his group.

  Caught in a combination of unrealistic ideals, bad business planning, and a poor work ethic, the Icarians could not survive the harsh Illinois conditions, even though Nauvoo was, compared with other settlements, quite established. Most of the Icarians had given the majority of their funds to Cabet, who was not a good businessman. By the time Cabet had purchased Nauvoo for the Icarians, he only had funds to buy beans for the group, many of whom had come from upper-class backgrounds.