The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting

"> Eva Crane was born in 1912, and trained initially as a mathematician. She turned to bees when a friend gave her a beehive to supplement the sugar rations during World War Two. She went on to write many books on bees and beekeeping, including this encyclopaedic tome, which I spent hours poring over in the reading rooms at the British Library. Dr Crane’s scope is vast. She travelled to over 60 countries and many remote places in the course of researching this book, the first comprehensive history of what she called the people’s use of social bees. “I frequently had to work at the limits of my own knowledge,” she writes, ‘but was greatly helped by specialists in various subjects.” She gathered knowledge and understanding from many areas, and is meticulous in the way she cross-references and records her sources—almost as though she means to demonstrate the bee-like, cross-pollinating nature of her work. I was especially struck by how beekeepers throughout history have felt compelled to look in on the interior life of the colony. Apparently Aristotle tried building a window in his hive, though that didn’t work: the bees obscured it with propolis, a sticky resin made from buds and sap. Pliny also described hives fitted with transparent mirror-​stone—probably the mineral mica. Later beekeepers experimented with escape hatches, divided compartments and multiple tiers, but they didn’t learn much more about what was going on inside the hive until the study of honeybees underwent a revival at the beginning of the Enlightenment era, by which time there were more tools and materials available. In 1653 the Reverend William Mewe constructed an octagonal hive with different levels, each one fitted with a small window sealed by a hinged shutter; in 1655 the diarist John Evelyn described a transparent apiary belonging to Dr Wilkins of Oxford, complete with dials, little statues, and vanes. It’s quite possible Evelyn’s imagination was running away with him here. Large sheets of glass weren’t produced in England for another few decades, and the window in Dr Wilkin’s hive was later described by a Mr Robert Wood as a peece of glass a little bigger than my hand. “Beekeepers throughout history have felt compelled to look in on the interior life of the colony” With developments in glass manufacturing, what we now call the Observation Hive arrived: a single comb bordered on each side by glass panes, and a whole colony on display to the viewing public. It was a popular exhibit. For a society on the cusp of industrialisation, the bees were intended to demonstrate willing and productive labour, all working for the common good. The hive has taken so many different forms, and what fascinated me most as I read Crane’s book was the way that each one seemed to reflect something of the culture that built it—from the roughly hewn basket skeps used by subsistence farmers through the middle ages to the baroque structures belonging to the upper classes of the seventeenth century right up to the endlessly modifiable, easily replicable, intervention-oriented hives in use today."