Plain Talk: Old Beekeeping Books (248)

Episode 248 – Plain Talk: Old Beekeeping Books

Jim Tew: Hey, podcast listeners, it's Jim here again this week. Got butterflies on my stomach because I'm antsy about this particular segment today. I've thought about it for months and months, finally decided to give it a shot, but it's going to be different for you, the listener, and for me, the presenter. I want to try to describe a peculiar beekeeping book to you that I basically found about 36 years ago. It's in terrible condition. It's just held together by a thread. It's mildewy and moldy, so when I'm reading it and looking at it, as I've done hundreds of times, I tend to get sneezy with this damp old book smell.

It's a British book. Here's the oddity. It's a bit selfish for me to do this segment because I don't have a clue where you can get a copy of this book, but I've used it innumerable times through the years. It still is intriguing, and I want to try to describe this book to you because it's like no other that I've got, and let you know that it exists, so if you happen to see one I don't know where, I would recommend buying it. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you here once a week at Honey Bee Obscura, where I always try to talk about something to do with plain talk beekeeping. I'll do my best on this odd subject today.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Listeners, about 36 years ago, I came across this book at a university surplus book sale. Of course, I would buy any book. I've bought books like this all down through the years at those library-type sales. They're usually traditional books that you've already got copies of, but for a buck or two, and you give the money to the library. I don't remember how much I gave for it. It is a tome. It's a huge book. This book, should I tell you now or tell you later? No, let me keep going for a minute. It's in a two-volume set. The first volume is 700 pages long. If I had to estimate just looking at it, it's probably 3 inches thick.

This book was written at a time when every word was not evaluated, selected, chosen, minimized. This guy just goes on and on and on. He gave me a complete rundown of himself and his brother, and how they have been on an absolutely lifelong beekeeping journey. In that process, he has trained himself, usually on his own, to the extent that he's held in high esteem in the British beekeeping historical perspective. He's no slouch of a guy, even though he's self-taught. The name of the book is Beekeeping, New and Old: Described with Pen andCamera. It was published in 19-- I told you now I've got to turn pages, and I can't turn them fast because the book's in such bad shape.

It's published in 1930. Now, let me go ahead and spill the beans on this. I told you in the intro that it's a two-volume set. I had Volume 1. Volume 1, like I said, was about 800 pages long. The size of the book itself and its age, and the horrible condition this has existed through has just about destroyed the binding. It's like I'm reading some kind of script from some ancient desert somewhere. You have to turn the pages carefully and with caution. The rub is that there is a Volume 2. This was a two-book set. As incredible as it might be, Volume 2 is even larger at 1,800 pages, so it's about three and a half inches thick.

I considered going in the house and weighing these books to get some idea of the weight of them, but I got myself under control and didn't do that. The reason that I'm so intrigued by this book is that they were not published at the same time. Volume 2 came out considerably later. Give me a minute while I check the date on that. Once again, the second volume is just as delicate as the first set. The second book was published in 1937. Here's the quirky thing. During a bombing raid in London, the warehouse holding Volume 2 took a hit and most copies of Volume 2 were destroyed. Volume 2 is very hard to get.

In this peculiarly useful, thorough book that I had, Volume 1, I had no index because the index was in Volume 2. If you wanted to find some historical note, if you wanted to look up something on beekeeping equipment, the history of it, or I'm going to talk to you, it goes into great detail on skeps. I'm going to go to that point here in a bit. All you could do was thumb through the book. About six months ago, a friend in England wrote me and said he had a copy. Some bad shape. I knew that because the one I've got's in bad shape.

Just about six months ago, in one of the most coveted books that I've ever gotten, I got Volume 2 of this book entitled Beekeeping, New and Old: Described with Pen and Camera, Volume 2. Now, I could put you through all the indices, but Volume 2 primarily was diseases, wax, propolis, flowers, pests, robbing. Volume 1 was history. I can't do it. I've used the whole 20 minutes just trying to describe the whole discussion to you of what these texts cover. These books, to me, are tools. For the articles I write, the podcasts that I do, to be as correct as I can, to get some historical reference, these old books are remarkably invaluable to me.

I've said time and time and time again that beekeeping, as we know it today, is just a snapshot. It's not beekeeping of 50 years ago. It's certainly not beekeeping of 100 years ago. How far back do you want to go? We have a bizarrely complex history with bees, and I hope all beekeepers always remember that they are the culmination of a long, long, long human interaction with bees. We have been fascinated with bees and the honey they produce for thousands and thousands of years. I don't know what else you can compare us to. We're not like bird watchers because, sure, humans looked at birds, but I don't know that we did make chickens, didn't we?

I don't know. Maybe there's something else that's comparable, but these books are of a tremendous value to me. I got into beekeeping because I was an avid, even passionate, woodworker. I was accumulating tools. I needed to justify the tools. I stumbled into beekeeping, a story I've told many times. I'll probably tell it again some other time, but I literally stumbled into beekeeping as I was becoming an entomologist. I didn't know anything about bees. I've only been doing this now just for a short time compared to everyone else, but the way I learned to keep bees is not how it is today.

A lot of these books review me on the things that I used to think were proper that are no longer done. That woodworking thing I was describing to you, one of the things that completely intrigued me is the author, whose name I've not given you, W. Herrod-Hempsall is one of those British hyphenated names. W. Herrod-Hempsall, H-E-M-P-S-A-L-L, goes into great detail. I don't know how to review this book with you. I don't even know if I should be doing this. Why am I talking to you about a book that you're going to have trouble finding?

Listeners, I have been unable with a fairly thorough look to find an archived version of this online. One of the digital books that you can search and read online, I've not even been able to find it there. I'm going to go to the book now, and I'm going to show you and describe to you some of the things that it covers that I find intriguing. First, I want to take a break and hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: Listeners, in Volume 1, the one I've had for almost the short side of 40 years, Chapter 3 is The Home of the Honey Bee and Nature and Under-Domestication. While I gently turn pages that you can hear, Hempsall starts out with bees hanging in the wild and natural nest, and then he goes through drumming. I don't think any of us have ever drummed bees very much. Kim and I talked about it, where you drum bees to drive them up out of the equipment by tapping on the side of the hive. There's a great discussion of what goes on with that. As he starts out, he's starting with bees and nature, the way they live their own lives, and then he went into skeps.

We have never kept bees to any great extent in the US in skeps, but in parts of Europe, skepists were completely common. I don't know why I would ever really want to go into great detail into skep beekeeping and skep making. Hempsall did it here. There was never a standard skep. There were skeps that were typical. Years ago, another prominent research scientist speculated that skeps came into being because swarms moved into baskets around the home site that were who knows what, sitting around outside. Someone came up with the notion from these volunteer bees occupying unused baskets in the neighborhood, and began to make intentionally these baskets to keep bees in.

There was a set of tools. It was not a complicated set of tools like you and I have today to manage our bees, but there were skep tools, our version of hive tools, that had a handle, a wooden handle. They were a long rod, probably 18 to 20 inches long, and the distal end of that rod was curved at a right angle, was flattened, and formed into a blade. The blade was toward the handle. You would use this long bent knife on a handle to go inside the skep where you had just killed it with sulfur, and then you would cut those containers, those connectors that held the comb to the skep walls.

I've never seen one, but I don't know why I would ever see one since we didn't use skeps much here. I don't go to antique stores much anymore, but I used to see things all the time. You'd try to justify what they were. As he went through these skeps describing it, he transitioned into the fact that as time passed, some of these skepists would lay bars across it because that skep design that we all know is a skep, that is by far not the only thing that exists out there. There's all these different skeps, and someone began to lay wooden sticks, wooden bars across the top of the basket, and that was some of the earliest forms of top bars inside those skeps.

If I flip over then to all of these hive designs, I've tried to mark the pages, but how do you mark almost 2,000 pages and do it? It goes through all the history of these designs, nooks, collateral hives. That may be pronounced collateral, but it looks to me like collateral. You see, at the time, top supering was not the sole way to do it. You could nadir a hive, which was to put the super underneath, or you could have these collateral hives where you put the supers on the sides, not on the top. I guess as time passed, the top super method must have worked out. We say time and time again that bees have the tendency to move upward.

He discusses these early options where other styles of hives were explored, and they're on our gigantic trash heap of ideas tried and not worked. Sir Lancelot Rolston is standing beside here, one of his Nutt's Collateral, N-U-T-T, Nutt's Collateral Hive. He had his picture taken standing by that hive over 100 years ago. There's all these designs. In our country, in my life, in my bee yard, there's just the Langstroth style, and sometimes I go wild and crazy and get some of the expanded polystyrene. There are so many different. Here's a picture of a super Stewarton hive.

All of these things were bizarrely complex and complicated. We tried everything, listeners. We tried everything trying to find a perfect beehive for us. I'll always plead the bees' case. We never really asked the bees what they needed, what they wanted. All of these hive designs were for us. There's a chapter here, I just love this, in 1930, a chapter here on the hanging top bar frame hive. We all think that this top bar thing is the latest idea, but it's actually a very old, old idea. Della Rocca had a hanging top bar hive. Dzierzon's hive is described here on page 175 of 800 pages.

There's just whole pages of pictures of Lee's octagonal hive, of the Berkshire hive, of the Alexander hive. I'm not reading them all, listeners. The Reit hive, the Keddington hive, Dr. Bevan's hive, White's Collateral hive. Ah, that's enough. Taylor's hive. Good grief. Every one of these things is just as weird as it can be. What that does for me, as you look back when King was going fist to cuffs with Langstroth, and they were both trying to get to King of the Hill of the type of hive to use, only to find out that there were so many of them. I'm not sure if I can go to it fast enough. Time is running out.

He said that in the US, it was generally thought that only the Langstroth hive was used. In the early 1900s, he said that there were several hundred using almost 313 frame colonies. There were 300 different styles of beehives, and he said in the UK, there was just one. One of these is the first American hive imported into England. It was on the basic principle of Nutt's hive, and he said it would be okay if you confused it for a washing machine because of all the glass observation ports. It makes me realize what a battle that Langstroth had to ingrain himself as the father of modern beekeeping in this country.

He had spectacularly more competition than we realize, and this old book does an unintentionally great process of delineating that long, drawn-out, complex, contorted history. Page 192, some of these pages are similarly, most of them, and ABC and whatever, but there's a list of all the frame sizes, Quinby’s, Langstroth's, Standard, American, Gallup, Original, Woodbury, Carl Stewarton, Abbott, Heddon. He covers it all. I wanted to let you know that there's a peculiar book, a two-volume set that's remarkably hard to get, that is remarkably thorough from my need as a historical perspective.

As you might expect, a book this old doesn't really have anything to speak of, unless you want to know some of the history of tracheal mites in England. It's really quite useless. It's helpful to go back to see how people controlled American foulbrood and did that kind of thing. If you see this book with this complex title, Beekeeping New and Old: Described with Pen and Camera, and he mentions the camera because he was a photographer, probably like I was a woodworker, I would scarf it up. Otherwise, I'll keep writing articles for you and referring to these old, worn-out, dilapidated books as often as possible.

I want to end on this note. There's a book that's modern that's in print by Lotte Möller, M-O-L-L-E-R, she's Swedish, named Bees and Their Keepers. She's a journalist, and she wrote this book from an odd perspective. She kept bees for a few years and decided it wasn't worth things for her. She just wrote about bees. She's multilingual. She's traveled the world. She personally met Brother Adam. She's been to California and tinkered around with Africanized bees. That book's in print. It was one of the most pleasantly readable books I've ever come across here lately.

I know there's a lot of bee books. Some of you probably written one. I'm not belittling your books or mine. Lotte Möller's book, Bees and Their Keepers, was an interesting read. I'll give you an example. She could cite a Roman situation in Roman times where people were complaining about beekeepers having their bees too close to their house, to their apartment, to whatever they were living in. I was totally intrigued at how far back beekeepers' issues with their neighbors go. Two books. The one that you're going to have a hard time finding is the one I've given you the title to several times.

The book that I just finished reading here just a few weeks ago, just because I enjoyed reading it, by Lotte Möller, Bees and Their Keepers, that one's available. It's cheap. You see that. It'll be a nice read for a while. I hope this was useful to you. It's just a tool I've got. It's very valuable to me. It excited me a lot to get both volumes of this old book. I just wanted to talk about it. Thanks for humoring me. I'll talk to you next week. I'm Jim, telling you goodbye.

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