Blast From the Past: Different Beekeeping Perspectives

The following excerpt was shared online recently and caught the attention of some of us here at Betterbee. The letter's author, A.W. Osborn, operated the Du Sac Apiary in Cuba in the late 1800s. In this portion of his letter, Osborn laments the fact that many beekeeping articles and books are written by people whose beekeeping experience is completely different from the experiences (and the needs) of their readers.  

The American Beekeeper from 1891.

Excerpted from "A Letter from Cuba." in The American Bee-Keeper, Volume 1, 1891 Read the full article here. 

There is no use of trying to keep the pure black bee here for they will starve in summer, and the pure Italian will live through the summer all right, and when it comes Fall the queens stop breeding, the workers fill up the brood chambers with honey, and you are but little better off with one race pure than with another, so we are obliged to give our preference to the hybrids, for they will "rustle" in the summer and winter alike.

These hair-splitting points about bands, the yellow or the black Italians and the nice spacing of the combs are of no use to us here. We must adopt the bees and the methods to give us the best results, and facilitate rapid manipulation. When we have tons of honey in the apiary waiting to be extracted so the bees can fill the combs again, we can not wait to be so very nice in spacing the combs in the top boxes. We get seven of them in the upper story the best we can without wasting time, and when we come around again in six or seven days they are full. That is the kind of spacing we do and that is the kind that pays the beekeeper here the best.

If I had but one colony of bees I think I would be very particular with them in spacing their combs, I would bring them to such a state of perfection in breeding that each worker should have at least seven stripes, then I would talk about them and fill the bee journals full of my experience as a bee-keeper, never forgetting to tell the reader that I started in the spring with one colony, took nine pounds of honey and increased to — nothing; and I never will forget to tell the dear reader how I managed those bees in order to get that amount of honey from them. Twaddle! Nonsense! Yet how much of this we see in the bee papers.

A. W. OSBORN. Punta Brava, Cuba, W. I., Dec. 4. 1891

The author highlights a problem from 130 years ago that is still a problem today: Beekeepers who think about bees from the perspective of university bee research, or practical backyard beekeeping, or large-scale commercial beekeeping, or bee disease regulation, or bee product development don't usually keep their bees the same way, and don't always know what other kinds of beekeepers want to learn about.  

Many articles about bees and beekeeping come from honey bee scientists working on a few research hives, but what insights can they offer a commercial beekeeper? Sometimes a beekeeper with 7,000 hives will prepare a lecture packed with the lessons he's learned over his career, but what useful hive inspection techniques can he teach a backyard beekeeper with two hives? Sometimes an enthusiastic bee scholar will spend decades reading all of the hundred-year-old beekeeping journal articles and synthesizing what they say, but what insights will he offer to improve the success of a new queen breeder? Does a beekeeper in South Carolina need to know how a beekeeper in North Dakota keeps their bees through the winter? Or vice versa? What can a carpenter-beekeeper, who builds her own boxes and frames, have to talk about with a beekeeper who uses a polystyrene and plastic hive fitted with a smart-phone connected digital hive scale? 

Here at Betterbee, we believe that all of these beekeepers should be talking to each other, and sharing the experiences that will help others keep their bees well.  

In this newsletter, we do our best to break through these barriers and get people talking about their bees in a way that will help beekeepers of various types. Our articles are written by Ph.D.s, veterinarians, engineers, experienced commercial-scale beekeepers, long-time backyard beekeepers, and brand-new hobbyist beekeepers. We've got some overly busy (or maybe just lazy?) beekeepers who don't have much time to interact with their bees, but we also have eager beekeepers who wish they could spend all day working with their bees. We are a company of diverse beekeepers, and we are happy to learn the perspectives of beekeepers with different experiences than our own. 

If you ever feel like we're missing an important perspective, feel free to let us know by writing to newsletter@betterbee.com. We welcome your suggestions and will continue to do our best to provide help to beekeepers from a wide variety of perspectives. Hopefully, none of you will ever look at our newsletter and exclaim: "Twaddle! Nonsense!"