The Golden Age of Beekeeping with Peter Borst (297)

297 - The Golden Age of Beekeeping with Peter Borst

Holly Atencio: Hi. This is Holly Atencio with Honey Do Bees from Stevensville, Montana. Welcome toBeekeeping Today podcast.

[music]

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Better Bee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shoutout to all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download and listen to over 250 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Hey, thanks a lot, Holly, for that wonderful opening from Montana. Becky, another state filled in on our state listener bingo card.

Becky: Oh, it's so much fun to fill in the map in Montana. They produce an awful lot of honey.

Jeff: How much honey do they produce?

Becky: Oh, in 2022 it was about 7 million pounds. I'd have to do some fact checking to get 2023's data.

Jeff: Wow.

Becky: That's a lot of honey though.

Jeff: That's a lot of supers.

Becky: They're a top five state, I think consistently. That's a lot of supers. It's a lot of extracting.

Jeff: That's fantastic. Thank you, Holly, for that opening. We definitely appreciate it. Anybody who wants to submit their own opening, please do. It's easy to do. Use your phone, use your recording app, whatever you want to do, just do what Holly did with her phone and welcome folks to the show. Stating your name and where you are and make it fun. Make it personal. We have a few coming up that folks will enjoy.

Becky: There was a time where we got a little sad because we didn't have some openers and I think we've got some compassionate entries, which I really appreciate. People have stepped up, but we can't run dry. We need to continue to get submissions, because I don't know why, but Jeff, it makes you probably just as happy as it makes me. These openers are just fun to listen to, and it's fun to have you put them on the map.

Jeff: You said sad, you're not saying whiny, right? You're not saying I was being whiny.

Becky: I did not use the word whiny and I won't use that. I think that we are sharing our true emotions that we know you're listening out there, we know you're out there, and we want you to be a part of the show. I think that you just conveyed that and there was a little sadness when we did not have an opener

Jeff: Talking about being whiny, it's the end of September, and I'm looking at my bees placing my wages as to who's going to make it through the winter, who's not. Who am I going to combine? Who am I just going to let go? What am I going to do? It's a tough time of year.

Becky: It's a sad time of year. It's harder if you're not in a state that produces a ton of honey, because you've been feeding your bees probably since August, I'm guessing, in order to make sure that they have enough stores, you have to be a really diligent great beekeeper. I think that it catches people off guard and sometimes they go and they heft their colonies and they're like, "Whoa, what happened?" Because bees continue to eat even if they're done producing honey.

Jeff: That's true. It is a shock for many first year and even second year beekeepers who are getting through the summer, they're feeling happy with the crop of honey they might have pulled and extracted, and then to go out to the hive and just see nothing there at the end of September and knowing that they're going to have to have a full super above that brood chamber to get those bees through the winter, it's decision time.

Becky: You're doing something very differently than what I'm doing, because I go to the apiary and I just literally keep lifting up those boxes. I lift the colony up from behind and I just feel how heavy they are, but you're tracking all your colonies or a lot of them. Correct?

Jeff: The problem with hefting that I found is that the heaviest hives are always at the end of the day. I don't know why that was that way. Yes, I do have scales on six of my colonies. I have a good understanding of when there's actually a flow on. Even in September this month, at the end of August, even after I took off my honey supers, the beginning of August, I was able to see that there was continued to be a bit of a flow on that would come in. I was happy about that because I wasn't worried about getting that flow for me. I was happy that the bees were getting that flow and storing that honey for themselves. Sitting here in the middle of September, I can open the colonies and that top super and it's a top deep, eight-frame deep, but they're all very full and that's a really good feeling.

Becky: That is very nice. There's nothing quite like seeing well-fed bees go into winter. We just talk about how sad the timing here is but that's a really good. Well-fed populous colonies are great to see.

Jeff: Have you ever opened a hive this time of year and expecting to see happy bees, and the top super's heavy and you pull it off and set it aside and you're going to go look underneath, and all of a sudden you see all these bees are the right size, but the eyes are gigantic and then you realize, "Oh my gosh, that's a bunch of those little stupid drones looking at me blinking." Of course they don't blink, but it looks as the sun catches their big eyes and they turn away, they look like they're blinking,

Becky: They're like, "Hey, what's up? We're just hanging in here, eating all the honey." [chuckles]

Jeff: They seemed like thousands of them looking at me. I was like, oh my gosh.

Becky: We've all seen it. Whether it be a laying worker situation or a drone layer situation, it happens to all beekeepers eventually. It's just one of those very, very sad moments in beekeeping, especially in the fall. It's not so sad for those drones because in many colonies they would've already been kicked out. My bees kicked out their drones a little while ago.

Jeff: What do you do when you open a colony and you see nothing but small drones in there?

Becky: Depends upon the time of year.

Jeff: Let's say the middle end of September.

Becky: They're going to take care of themselves in the sense of they can't take care of themselves. You really don't have any options. You can take off that top super, because they're not going to get to it because in Minnesota it's going to be cold enough that the nights are going to be cool. They don't have a really fantastic thermal regulation system, so they are eventually going to just die. I try to make sure they're not going to starve, but they don't need that deep of honey. It doesn't make sense to try to combine them because honestly, there's no self-respecting operating colony that's going to take on a bunch of new drones and not just immediately kick them out. They're going to live longer than most of the drones in the apiaries that I manage, and then I'm just going to eventually call it a day.

Jeff: I have a picture, I'll throw it up in the show notes, of all these little eyes looking at me. I got a terrified chuckle out of it. It was fun. Anyways, history of beekeeping, Becky. It is pretty cool. Long ago, I shouldn't say long ago, several seasons ago, years ago, Kim and I had Tammy Horn Potter on talking about history of beekeeping in America. It's a fantastic show, fantastic book Tammy wrote. I encourage anybody to check either and both out. Today's guest has written a book, it's called The Golden Age of Beekeeping. Peter Borst is our guest today and he'll be here to talk about what he wrote about the beginning of beekeeping in the United States and some of the big names that we all know about. It's going to be a fun listen.

Becky: There are some exciting twists and turns and lots of drama and believe it or not, beekeeping was really disorganized in the beginning. I can't wait to hear from Peter because I really did enjoy this book.

Jeff: Let's get to Peter right after this quick word from our sponsors.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Sitting across a big Beekeeping Today podcast table right now is Peter Borst. Peter has written a fantastic book called The Golden Age of Beekeeping. I think that you'll enjoy this interview. Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Borst: Yes, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it very much.

Becky: Peter, I enjoyed the book so much, and I have a list of questions for you. I'm so honored that you joined us for this discussion.

Peter: Thanks for saying that. Thank you.

Jeff: For our listeners who may not know you, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what got you into beekeeping?

Peter: I just actually sent off an article to the American Bee Journal called 50 Years Among The Bees. It starts off by saying, one of the first books that I read was 50 Years Among The Bees by C. C. Miller, and at this point, I could write my own book, but I don't know if I'll do that. Anyway, I started out in 1974, working for a commercial beekeeper, a large scale commercial beekeeper here in upstate New York. He was running somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,200 hives and had no permanent help. He just would hire people in the spring and give them a bee veil, a smoker, and the keys to a truck, and you were a beekeeper.

Believe me, I knew next to nothing, and he was not a very good teacher. He would just send you off and say, "Just go do this." To be honest with you, I got stung hundreds and hundreds of times. 100 times in a day was not considered abnormal at all. He was not very helpful. I lasted out the summer, but then I decided, this is not really for me. To make a long story short, I ended up going to work in a bee supply factory in San Diego. That was a 9:00 to 5:00 job. That was a little bit more satisfactory considering I had two young kids. That was a big change, and it helped me get through that period. I could go on for 20 minutes.

Jeff: Were you making frames and hive bodies, or were you doing something different?

Peter: Honeycomb Foundation. We were making pure beeswax foundation in a neighborhood of 1,000 pounds a day. That was my job, and also mind the store. If somebody came in, I'd have stop what I was doing and go sell them whatever it was that they were buying. It may be anywhere from a couple of hive kits or a couple 100 hive kits, or occasionally somebody would pull in with a semi-load of beeswax to sell.

It was a wide range of activities. It gave me an opportunity to meet a wide range of beekeepers, from the little guys to the large scale big guys. This was in the '70s still. By the '80s, I decided to go into business for myself. I bought out a guy in the neighborhood and I ended up with 450 hives of my own. We mostly sold bee pollen. We were collecting bee pollen. That was making, at least as much or maybe more money than the honey. It's worth about 10 times as much as the honey at wholesale. The tragic part of this whole story was that honey was getting about 35 cents a pound in the 1980s. It finally got to the point where we couldn't make it work, so I bailed.

Jeff: On the honey?

Peter: On having a bee business of my own. Then I went to work at Cornell as the Senior Apiarist at the Dyce Lab. I was able to manage a couple 100 hives and get a steady paycheck. That was pretty much ideal. During the period starting about, I would say 2006, I've been writing regularly for the American Bee Journal pretty much once a month. There's hundreds of articles.

Jeff: Your book is called The Golden Age of Beekeeping. How and why did you narrow it down on this area in number of years for your book or your interest?

Peter: In the introduction, I mentioned that I was studying the history of beekeeping in New York State in the general vicinity where I am. We think that large scale beekeeping started in New York State, because that's where we are, but I realized it started simultaneously in multiple regions in California, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and of course in Europe to some degree. In the introduction, I mentioned that I was thinking of writing about the history of beekeeping in New York State. My wife said that would be interesting to about 10 bald guys with beers.

[laughter]

I decided to change the title and broaden the scope.

[laughter]

The reason why I call it The Golden Age is it starts in the 1860s, pretty much when the American Bee Journalbegan its operations. Bee Journal, I think it was monthly at first, then it became weekly. Bee Culture Magazinestarted around 1875. They did the similar thing. They went from monthly to weekly and then back to monthly. I think a lot of people don't realize, when we talk about the age of information today, that was an age of information too. You had these weekly magazines and newspapers coming out, and people were extremely well informed. If there was a new idea that was-- Somebody had come up with a new idea about how to do this or that with beekeeping, everybody knew about it within a week. That doesn't mean they adopted it, but they knew about it. They had in-depth discussions on all of the topics like it is today. In fact, maybe it was better then because people really wanted to talk about things and exchange ideas. You don't see that in the journals as much anymore, there's online discussions of course.

Jeff: Is that why you called it The Golden Age, is because there was so much shared interest?

Peter: Yes. Also in the 1860s to the period of about 1920, honey was extremely valuable. It was a precious commodity. It was something that people wanted to get natural honey and have it on their table. Beekeepers expanded their operations to the extent where they could produce tons and tons of comb honey. Comb honey was a beautiful thing. Then of course, extracted honey came about, and they started producing tons of that. By the turn of the century, beekeepers got to be so good at what they were doing that they depressed the price of it. They went down this spiral where they got their trucks, and they mechanized the whole procedure, and pretty much I think they shot themselves in the foot because they devalued the product, which means they would have to produce three or four times as much, which they could do by further mechanizing. To me, that was so different from the period prior to that where most of this work was done by hand, and the product was extremely valued by the customer. They weren't putting it in tank trucks.

Jeff: It went from being a specialized product to something that was made a commodity?

Peter: Yes, cheap and available, which there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is people didn't really take advantage of that, because you could get corn syrup and molasses even cheaper. The honey moved into this category where it no longer had the attraction that it once did. That's why I basically consider the golden age as being from the 1860s to, let's say 1920 at the latest, maybe even 1910, when they started to get gasoline powered vehicles. When the gasoline motor was invented, they used gasoline motors on the farm, they used gasoline motors to power the honey extractors. There was gasoline motors everywhere. You imagine what a stench that was.

Jeff: The sound.

Peter: And the noise.

Jeff: Be worse than leaf blowers.

Becky: Peter, one of the things I liked so much about the book was you describing really the disorganization of the industry to its establishment as really a livestock industry, because whether it was the boxes or where the bees were kept in, the adaptation of using movable frames or standardizing anything, it was extremely disorganized. Your accounting of how it all transitioned was very informative. That's not a question, but just go ahead.

Peter: I think it's important for people to understand. You hear people say the Langstroth hive or whatever. It was really Amos Root that standardized everything. The Dadants had their own hive and their own frames, and it was bulky and cumbersome. A. I. Root just realized that if people had hives that were modular, it would just completely change everything. You could stack them up four or five boxes, whatever you-- And you could contract them back down to one or two boxes in the wintertime. He basically standardized the size of the hive, the shape of the hive, the frames, the comb foundation. I don't think he gets enough credit.

He was definitely an entrepreneur in the beekeeping field. I think that if A. I. Root had gone into some other field, for example, electricity, we'd be talking about him alongside of Edison. He would be a household name like Edison or Graham Bell, or any of these people, but the fact that he focused on that one particular industry. Don't get me wrong, that wasn't all he did. He was one of the first people to have a catalog business where you could order stuff, not only beekeeping supplies, but he started selling sewing machines and furniture.

Way before Sears, he was doing this. He was a brilliant inventor. Now, towards the end of his career, he started dominating the Bee Magazine with these moral. He would just go on and on about tobacco and prohibition and stuff like that. Half the magazine would be dedicated to getting rid of vices. That was quaint. In a sense, it undermines his stature as an inventor, as a forward-thinking individual.

I don't know if you know this or not, but he was on the site when the Wright brothers launched their first flights, and he said that he photographed it and documented it, and tried to sell the story to the magazines. Nobody was interested. They thought. "This is not going to go anywhere. People are not going to be able to fly. That's crazy." He put the story in his Bee Magazine. He was really the first person to publicize this, bring it to the public's attention. He was right, flying is something that everyone does.

Jeff: A. I. Root was an interesting character in and of himself, and I've often-- I don't know whether I got this from Root or from Kim, but often thought of him as the Henry Ford of the beekeeping.

Peter: Exactly. That's what I'm saying.

Jeff: He didn't create it, but he just made it popular for the masses.

Peter: He streamlined the operation. He realized that if this was going to really work, you had to have standardized equipment. You had to be able to make them and mass produce. He was one of the early adopters of electricity and gas motors and everything like that. Don't get me wrong, I fully supported the beekeeping industry as it is today, with their semi-trucks and their traveling back and forth from Connecticut to Central Valley, California, down to Florida, et cetera.

There's something precious and interesting about the Golden Age, which that's what I've focused on because I think far fewer people know about that, or maybe they don't care. History has become a very sore subject because recently, we were having a Zoom call, and one of the professors said he'd just listened to a bunch of talks by youngsters in their 20s, and he goes, "They act like history started in the year 2000." It was before that. Forget it.

Becky: I think just reading through the book, beekeepers are going to be able to hear the rest of the story. You hear the names and the characters, and you learn them if you're a beekeeper over time, but you don't know all the details. You were able to really tell us a lot about people's lives and what they did before they made a impact into the beekeeping industry. You also provided the framework for what beekeepers were thinking or what they actually knew at the time.

Whether it's just understanding the behavior of the bees or the honey crops, the fact that the transformation from comb honey to liquid honey just really changed how beekeepers were able to produce honey. You have so many details in this book that beekeepers are going to love to hear, I think.

Peter: I appreciate you saying that very much. As you can imagine, I spent years digging into this. I had the idea of writing a book, but I just felt like this was too big of a job for me. Tom Seeley was the first person to encourage me. He says, "Peter, you should write the book on beekeeping history because this is something that you know about and that you care about." Going back to what you said, yes, it's the story of the people. It's the people that did this. It's the people that interest me.

I believe that the book's strong Point it's about the people, and not just the A. I. Roots and Charles Dadant, but the ordinary folk that dedicated their lives to doing beekeeping, and then in many cases, promoting beekeeping and making it into an educational endeavor. Without all of that activity by all of those people, we wouldn't be having this conversation now.

Jeff: I really would like to get into discussion more beyond Langstroth and Root, and maybe talk about some of these other fun characters [unintelligible 00:25:50] in your book, [unintelligible 00:25:51] or Huber, or seen pictures of queen bee as a smoker and everything, but let's hear from our sponsors, and we'll be right back.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Peter, one of my tidbits that occurs a couple of times in the book is the fact that beekeepers had to defend themselves to producers because producers thought that their honeybees were damaging fruit.

Peter: Oh, you mean fruit producers? Yes. That was a very interesting saga. I actually grew up in San Diego, where a lot of this took place. Fruit growers, for example, grape growers, were very-- There were a lot of grape growers in San Diego, not so much anymore. For whatever reason, they moved up into Northern California. I believe the reason was because the water supply in San Diego is much more variable than Central Valley, where they pipe water from Sierra Nevadas.

Anyway, so the grape growers and the fruit growers were adamant that the bees would come and eat the fruit before it was ready to be picked. There was full-scale battles between the beekeepers and the fruit growers, to the extent where fruit growers actually set fire to beehives, tried to drive them out of the neighborhood. There's an ironic follow-up to this. About 10 years ago, the Disney Corporation decided to plant millions of acres of oranges in the Central Valley.

They were going to raise clementines, which, as you know, the clementines from Spain are seedless. They just thought, "We're going to plant clementines." They didn't realize that if bees pollinate-- The oranges, they have seeds. If there's no bees, there's no seeds. They, all of a sudden, realized they'd made a huge blunder, and they tried to outlaw beekeeping in the Central Valley, which has been going on there for 100 years.

People are saying, "Excuse me, you didn't do your homework. We're not leaving. You're going to have to net your trees." That's a spinoff from the animosity between fruit growers and beekeepers. Eventually, fruit growers realized how important bees were to their fruit crop. Prior to, let's say, about 1890, they didn't have a clue that bees were pollinating. They just didn't realize that was what bees and other pollinators did.

This came to a head when huge acreages of cherries were planted in Washington state, and they planted all the same variety. Even then, they got in bees, but they didn't realize that they had to have different varieties to get cross-pollinated. Around 1900, the whole thing came wide apart. You have to have varieties, you have to have them planted in rows parallel to each other, and you have to have bees.

The thing about honeybees is it's something that you can rent them, you can have them on site. With the native bees, there's been a lot of research done here in New York state about native bees. There's one professor that was propagating the idea that native bees could do the whole job. We don't need honeybees. Honeybees are invasive European, et cetera, et cetera. The fact of the matter is, some years, the native bees can do the job. Some years, they don't survive the winter, or they don't come out at the right time. That's why it's very important to be able to call somebody up and say, "Can you have bees on the property April 20th and get them out of here on May 20th because we're going to start spraying."

Becky: The issue with the bees damaging fruit, which I think we get to blame yellow jackets for that. That also highlighted something in the industry as far as beekeepers' relationship with scientists. Because I think at one point, there was a call maybe to find a scientific basis for how the fruit was being damaged. You navigate the importance of how beekeepers helped beekeepers learn about management and learn about how to improve their operations. Science came into it, not right away, but a little bit later. I think it reflects what's going on today, where beekeepers are doing a great job with management, and we have to also manage how much science comes into the industry. Is that fair?

Peter: Yes. I think the relationship between science and beekeeping has ebbed and flowed. I think there are a lot of very scientific beekeepers. When Doolittle in the 1880s developed the new way of raising queen bees, which had never done before, he referred to it as scientific beekeeping. This was an application of everything that we know about raising queen bees and placed on a scale, where you could do it dependably in a large scale where you could reliably take orders for queens and sell them by the thousands. It's a mix of scientific understanding and also entrepreneurship.

You can never leave that out of the equation. Beekeepers were ultimately entrepreneurs. In fact, I had mentioned earlier that I had a small bee business of my own. I always tell people, I thought you could get really good at beekeeping and then you'd be fine. I didn't realize you also had to be good at business. I think that portion of my brain never developed. I just did not have the business sense. As soon as I realized that, I realized I just need to get out of business and go into some other field because I'm never going to excel at this. I went to academia, I worked at Cornell University for 20 years. Now I'm retired on a pension. If I'd stayed in the business, I probably wouldn't have any of that.

Jeff: In your book, you talk about the personalities and beekeeping. People often talk about the men of beekeeping such as the Dedant and Root. You bring up folks such as Samuel Wagner, et cetera. You also mentioned the women were prominent also in the industry. You talk about Ellen Tupper, is that right? Can you talk a little bit about her?

Becky: Ellen, do we have to talk about Ellen? Go ahead. If we talk about Ellen, we're going to talk about, is it the Ashley Apiary?

Peter: Jenny Ashley.

Becky: Yes. We have to talk about her too.

Jeff: Let's talk about both.

Peter: Both of these women became entrepreneurs and sold queen bees and bees. Ellen Tupper was, I don't remember, I think she was based in the Midwest although she traveled quite a bit, whereas Jenny Ashley was pretty much centered in Southern Texas. She realized that being in Southern Texas, she had a huge advantage that she could raise bees early and supply people with queens and bees way earlier than-- Prior to that time, the queen bee industry was centered in the Northeast. They would start raising queens in May, and people would want them earlier than that.

When the Southern states realized that they had this advantage, where they could raise queens and sell them in April, even in March if they wanted to, that changed everything. In terms of the women beekeepers, this is a very important thing to me, because all throughout history, you don't see women represented to the extent that we feel like we want to see that. The problem is they were not given the advantages. People stood in their way, and then when like an encyclopedia would be written, they wouldn't get their place in the book.

Take for example, Anna Comstock, I don't think I mentioned Anna Comstock. Her husband, John Comstock was an entomologist around 1900 and on. She was an entomologist in her own right, but she couldn't get her doctorate degree because she was a woman. He allowed her to do as much as she could and supported her as much as she could. She did teaching. Anna Comstock wrote a series of books, Nature Studies for Children.These were brilliant. Each lesson would take the children out and show them some aspect of nature. She also wrote a manual on beekeeping.

Recently, I went to a presentation where one of the scholars at Cornell studied Anna Comstock's life. She realized that in her autobiography, there were vast chapters that were cut out. The editors said, "This stuff is too personal," and they cut out vast portions of her autobiography. The scholar was able to get the original manuscript and restore it. Basically, the attitude was that women take things too personally, they care too much, and they're not businesslike. Their stories were, in many, many cases, suppressed. Now, I didn't get this into the book, but C. C. Miller, who wrote the book Fifty Years Among the Bees, his right-hand assistant was his wife's sister.

Her name was Emma Wilson. She had a column in the Bee Magazines for about 15 or 20 years. It started out Our Beekeeping Sisters then it was changed to Beekeeping for Women. This came out every month. She would address specific questions that women would write to her about. They were ordinary beekeeping questions. They weren't necessarily women's questions. They were just questions that women had about beekeeping that they didn't feel like men would answer them. They were up against this attitude where beekeeping is not for women. Unfortunately, in the 20th Century it became more so because it was all about trucks and machinery and forklifts. In some sense, I think that perhaps women weren't necessarily attracted to that type of activity. It's not that way anymore.

You encounter women mechanics and truck drivers and everything like that. I think in the golden age, I think there was more opportunities for women. Obviously, C. C. Miller realized that his wife's sister was more capable than he was. He said most of the time when they had an argument, he would defer to her because she was usually right. I want to write that story about Emma Wilson in an upcoming article in the Bee Journalbecause it's an interesting story. It has a sad ending, Miller died first, and then his wife and Emma lived for about another 10 years. When Miller's wife died, Emma died within a couple of days. They were just so close that it was just over for her.

Becky: The women are definitely prominent throughout the chapters of your book.

Peter: Yes. I think we should mention, I've been in the beekeeping business since 1974. I've seen it change so much. Even in the '80s, I think the beekeeping research was dominated by men. Over the years, it's completely turned around. Most of the prominent bee researchers that I respect, Christina Grozinger and Marla Spivak and Tammy Horn Potter, these are all people that they're in their heyday. Especially Christina, she has a huge department at Penn State. It's diversified. There's people working on pollination issues. There's all different issues. Of course, Heather Mattila, she went to Wellesley College, and they didn't have a beekeeping department. She established it herself. The rest is history.

Becky: I want to talk a little bit more about honey. Two quick questions. One, could you address buckwheat honey is pretty prominent, which I was at how prominent it was in the book. Also, I don't know whether or not it's the origin of the jars but you mention a muth, I don't know if I'm saying that right, but M-U-T-H. I'm wondering if that person you talk about is the same person who develops the muth jars.

Peter: Yes, that is the self same person. [crosstalk]

Becky: It is. Can you tell me how to pronounce it too?

Peter: Yes, you're right, muth. It's an attractive jar. People realized that if something's packaged attractively, it's going to walk off the shelf. Going back to your question about buckwheat honey, this is my region. I like to say I live in the white clover buckwheat region. In the 1880s, clearance of the probably 1920s, this entire region from Massachusetts clear on out to Ohio and probably further to Illinois was mostly, it was a huge dairy region. They planted white Dutch clover everywhere.

I have to backtrack a bit, because prior to that the whole region of course was forested. When the European settlers came, they just considered the forest to be in the way. As a matter of fact, in many, many cases, they would cut down the trees, they would have work parties. All the people in the neighborhood get together, cut down the trees and put them into huge piles and burn them up. Because they just figured this was in the way and useless.

Then when the industrial revolution came, the wood was a source of fuel for steam engines and mechanization. That further decimated the forest of the Northeast and this was all converted into pasture. You had your dairy industry. The story about the buckwheat is that buckwheat is one of the few crops that you can get into the ground and harvest in about three months. This was important in this region, because a lot of times the farmers couldn't get their plows in the ground until the end of June because it was so wet and the soil was clay and it was just a terrible, terrible-- Actually a terrible reason for doing agriculture.

It was conducive to planting millions of acres of clover and buckwheat. Clover of course was for the cows and the dairy. That all changed when California became the bread basket of the universe and the demand for New York state produce dried up. It's still sold locally. I think we're number three or number four in apple production in the country, but it's mostly sold locally et cetera. Grapes really never took off in the Finger Lakes despite what the Finger Lakes grape growers would like to tell you, "We just don't really have the climate for producing grapes on a large scale. What would you like to know about buckwheat other than that?

Becky: Buckwheat is a crop that I think a lot of beekeepers don't want just a little bit of it in their honey, but one, sells better as a single source because it can really obviously impact the taste of a clover crop. Were beekeepers-- Was that one of the very first single source honey? Were they extracting it separately and making sure that it stayed out of other honey crops?

Peter: Yes. While you bring up as an interesting point about single source, there was no problem with that because the clover crop bloomed and produced honey in June and July and tapered off in August and the buckwheat started in the mid-August. It was very seldom that those would become blended. Clover was considered to be the crème de la crème crème de la crème of honey, this was the honey to which all others were compared. It's light, it's mild, it's fragrant. Whereas buckwheat, if you didn't grow up eating buckwheat you're not going to like it.

I first had buckwheat when I was a kid. My family used to come up to the Finger Lakes in the summer. I learned to like buckwheat honey when I was about seven years old. There's a secret about that though, let me tell you. People who get pure buckwheat, they do not like it. Buckwheat is usually blended. If it's 50% buckwheat, people will say, "Ah, that's buckwheat. Just like I remember it." This is a bonus for the packers, if they get a ton of buckwheat, they can mix it with a ton of anything else and people think, "This is the best buckwheat we ever had." I'm not making this up.

Becky: Were beekeepers though pulling off their clover crop and extracting it and then putting those supers back on?

Peter: Exactly:

Becky: Or they were-- Okay.

Peter: No, that's exactly. I still do that myself. We get three crops, we get a spring crop, a summer crop and a fall crop. Now I should say we don't always get a spring crop. If the bees are in poor condition at the end of the winter we end up having to divide all the colonies and we don't get any spring honey at all. If the bees come through with flying colors, we may get a fabulous spring crop. To me, it's bland and unappealing. Then the summer honey comes and then for each of these crops, we take all the supers off and then put them back on again.

There is this separation. It's not a deliberate separation. It's not like I want to keep this separate. It's kept separate because we're reusing the supers. In the late August, we don't have buckwheat anymore. Buckwheat is very, very seldom planted anymore in this region, because in its heyday it was a food staple. When the European immigrants came from Russia and Poland, and in those countries, that was on the table every day. They ate buckwheat every day.

As a matter of fact my wife's grandmother, when she would visit her kitchen it always smelled like buckwheat. The buckwheat itself was not in demand anymore. It's very rare that you see it planted. Now I live in the vicinity of Amish and Mennonite farmers and they still plant it and there's a limited demand for it. They're covering that demand. Probably in terms of being a cash crop it's probably not right up there with some of the better ones but it's a crop that you can plant in unfavorable weather and get a yield.

Jeff: I remember buckwheat pancakes long and long, long ago.

Peter: I like all of those things but the fact of the matter is buckwheat came and went and the same is true with a white clover. I asked a farmer in my neighborhood one time, how come nobody plants white clover anymore? He goes, "Because you can't use it for silage." If you try to make silage out of it, it just turns into mush, so they plant corn instead.

Jeff: I have one last question for you. You have many great illustrations and old photographs in your book and those are fun just to look at. One of the things that came to my attention right away was so many of those horse drawn carts pulling these many hives along a road. How did they keep the horses from getting stung and/or charging off after being stung pulling all those hives? Do you know?

Peter: That's a very interesting question. Let me go back to the pictures though. This whole book was written originally as articles in the American Bee Journal. The pictures in the articles in the Bee Journal, many of them were in color. There were so many pictures that I had that didn't make it into the book, because the book designer he selected which pictures to use. I just had handed the whole thing over to them. My dream was to stitch together the articles from the Bee journal into a magazine but that didn't come out. Back to the horses. I have actually seen pictures of horses and carriages where the horse was covered with a giant canvas.

Becky: Oh god.

Peter: Basically the horse had a bee suit. It's a real problem. I know that they had a lot of problems because I've read of terrible, terrible disasters when the horse got stung and tipped over the cart and people were killed. When the gasoline powered vehicles came out, the beekeepers, many of them were the first adopters. They thought, "This is going to be great. I don't have to worry about the horse getting stung and galloping off." There's another part to the story which is interesting.

Like I said, I first started studying beekeeping history of my own region and prominent among the people, they're mentioned in the book the Coggshall family. This was a very important family beekeeping in this region. I studied them for five or six years before I even thought of writing a book. What they did was they had bee yards out yards, what we call out yards, where they would be 5 or 10 miles from the house. Typically they had all of the equipment that they needed in the bee yard in a shed.

There's a picture of the crew getting ready to go out that day. They're all on bicycles. The whole crew goes out like five or six guys, go out to the bee yard, do the work, everything they need is there. There's a honey extractor. When they start doing the honey extracting, they would extract it right there in the shed and put it in wooden barrels right there in the shed and they would leave it until winter. Then they would go out with sleighs because the roads were so terrible in those days, you didn't really want to be pulling heavy loads down these ruddy and possibly muddy roads, so they'd wait till there was a good layer of snow and they would go out in a sleigh. As far as how they got away with that, I don't know. It is true that if you move bees at night, they do not come out and they may come out on the outside of the hives, but they're not going to fly. I think probably a lot of that work was done at night

Jeff: Peter, I'm afraid we're at the end of our time. I can't believe it passed so quickly. This is really, really fascinating. I encourage our listeners to pick this up this winter and give it a good read because it's really gives you an insight to why we are where we are in the industry and some of the developments and equipment, and processes, and methodology. We're lucky to have you there to document it for us and put it all in a book in your monthly column.

Becky: Yes. I think beekeepers are going to be very surprised about what they don't know and so many topics that you address are really concerns today. I think that this is such a good read for getting us all up to speed. I think I'm going to be a better beekeeper because I read it Peter. Thank you.

Peter: Thanks for having me on. Thanks for all your kind words.

Jeff: Becky, that was so much fun having Peter on the show and it only goes his last statement. Do you remember the last-- He started talking about bees and bicycles and I knew that there was a connection between all of this for me.

Becky: I want you to start working bees at different yards and use your bike to go in between the yards.

[laughs]

Jeff: No, no.

Becky: Can you imagine? I almost break out in a sweat thinking of just going to a yard with a bicycle because everything's in my truck. It's an interesting, and reading about that he actually was able to visit one of those locations. I think he saw that they marked their yearly harvest in the wall and those markings are still there, so there's some family members still around.

Jeff: That is so cool. There's so much history in beekeeping and people think about that, crazy beekeepers or it's shoved off to the back corner of history now with everything that's going on with AI and whatever the topic [unintelligible 00:52:44] is. Beekeeping and providing that source of a suite to people was so important for so long. Then Peter describes it up until the 1920s, 1930s.

Becky: For me, I was able to identify who I was in beekeeping through reading this book, because it talks about scientists and beekeeping and women and beekeeping and then beekeeping operations. Then I've always appreciated beekeepers who come up with so many different ways of doing things. Then I just love it. It's like, oh my gosh. It's attracting the same kind of people that got us to where we are. The people who never stop questioning and saying, "Can we do this better?" That's pretty cool.

Jeff: I think it's really cool.

Becky: It's a good read. It's a good gift for beekeeper friends. It's just a great journey through history

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any webpage. We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Betterbee, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support.

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the Leave a Comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

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