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Famous Beekeepers
Aristotle 384-322 BC
Aristotle was very passionate about apiculture and honey bees, and worked closely together with countless beekeepers. In fact, he made several theories about the behavior and even the origin of bees. For example, he thought bees came from the flowers of brooms, reeds, and olives! While this may sound ridiculous to us (and it is a bit ridiculous), the reason why he believed this is quite interesting. First, he noticed that every time there was a large harvest of olives there were also significantly more bees swarming. This led him to believe that bees spontaneously generate from flowers. He also maintained that 1) Masculine creatures are armed with strong weapons; 2) Worker bees have stingers; 3) Therefore, worker bees are males. The idea stuck for 2,000 years. But many of his other observations were more accurate. He noticed that the more the flower thyme bloomed, the better the honey yield beekeepers could expect, which allowed Aristotle to forecast honey yields.
Morgan Freeman
Morgan Freeman began beekeeping in 2014 and he feels a deep connection with his honey bees. His home ranch in Mississippi now houses 26 hives, and he passionately promotes environmental preservation, and does his part to combat the local decline of pollinators. To quote Morgan: ‘There’s a concerted effort to bring bees back onto the planet. We do not realize that they are the foundation, I think, of the growth of the planet, the vegetation…’
Sherlock Holmes AROUND 1880-
Sir Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series, is an avid bee enthusiast. Many fans of Sherlock Holmes know that a few years after Doyle attempted to kill Holmes at the Reichenback Falls, Doyle instead decided to send Holmes into retirement in Sussex where he would spend the rest of his days as a beekeeper. It’s rather easy to envision Holmes conducting more than a few experiments on his beloved bees, but we are certain that they are experiments to help the bees.
Henry Fonda 1905-1982 AND Peter Fonda
Henry was an amateur beekeeper who supplied his friends with jars labelled ‘Henry’s Honey.’ His son Peter (left) played a beekeeper in the 1997 movie ‘Ulee’s Gold’ - harvesting the famous Tupelo honey.
Napoleon Bonaparte 1769-
Napoleon Bonaparte’s symbol/emblem of cultural growth was the ‘Golden Honey Bee.’ He respected bees as they were orderly, efficient, and worked without question for the good of the colony.
Scarlett Johansson
Actor Samuel Jackson got Scarlett Johansson and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, a beehive as a wedding present. She is also a huge fan of Medicinal Honey.
George Washington 1732-
In 1787, President Washington had an apiary constructed on the Mount Vernon property that he had inherited. Today, a replica sits in the place of the beehives on the ground. President Washington’s hives, along with many of the beehives in the southern states in the late 1700s, were made out of black gum from trees. The reason for this was because the heartwood decays quickly, which leaves a hollow trunk that is perfect as a beehive. These black gum beehives became known as ‘gums,’ which is why the word is now used generally for any hive.
Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-
With his brother Rex, Sir Edmund Hillary became a beekeeper, a summer occupation that allowed him to pursue climbing in the winter. His interest in beekeeping later led Hillary to commission Michael Ayrton to cast a golden sculpture in the shape of honeycomb in imitation of Daedalus’s lost-wax process. This was placed in his New Zealand garden, where his bees took it over as a hive and ‘filled it with honey and their young.’ Compiled by Glenbo
Maryam Henein
An investigative journalist, film producer and writer, Maryam is co-director of ‘The Vanishing of the Bees.’ She has dedicated her life to drawing parallels between autoimmune sufferers and honeybees as she believes both are environmental indicators.
Leonardo Di Caprio
Leonardo took up beekeeping to handle stress before the Oscars in 2016. He was introduced to the hobby by his mother’s boyfriend David Ward as a means to deal with stress before the Oscars, and this hobby continues to help him ‘chill out.’
Matt Damon
Damon learnt the art of beekeeping from his grandfather as a child, and although nowadays his busy lifestyle means he doesn’t always get to tend to his bees personally, he employs a full-time beekeeper at his home in Florida and often gives gifts of fresh honey to friends and relatives.
Flea
The Red Hot Chilli Peppers bassist is loving every moment working his 3 honey bee hives in his backyard. The reason: ‘no bees = no bee pollination = a lot less food!’ He posts lots of pictures of himself tending bees on social media.
Maria von Trapp 1905-
After singing the praises of the hills of the Austria, Maria von Trapp and family moved to Vermont USA in 1939 and she took up the practice of beekeeping on the site of the musical camp they built.
Martha Stewart
The undisputed Queen of Homemaking on television, Martha is an avid blogger, and has cretated many current and entertaining bee blogs. Beekeeping, as Martha puts it, has ‘something so romantic’ about it that she was simply compelled to own her own hives
Michelle Obama
The ex-First Lady set an example for the USA by banning bee-killing pesticides from the White House gardens and urging the EPA and Congress to take swift action to protect bees and other pollinators. The first-ever White House beehives have been installed.
Benjamin Franklin 1706-
Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin briefly became passionate about beekeeping. As for many beginner beekeepers, he was not fond of the idea of getting stung by a bee and, back in the 18th Century, getting stung was almost certain for beekeepers as bee suits were not widely used. So Benjamin went to the drawing board and began to develop a piece of equipment that would forever change beekeeping – THE CROTCHLESS BEE SUIT. Crotchless? Apparently, Mr, Ftanklin suffered from massive bladder stones in the years leading up to his death in 1790. Perhaps because of this (and perhaps not), he designed his bee suit to allow for quick urination whenever the need arose. What he may not have expected, however, is that after the first time he used it a beelanded on his... well, you get the point. After this rather uncomfortable experience, Benjamin forgot about the bee suit and instead invented the first medical catheter. In Benjamin’s own words: ‘Tart words make no friends; a spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.’
Sting
Sadly, he’s not a beekeeper! Gordan Sumner received his stage name, Sting, during college from a band mate who believed Sumner resembled a bee from often wearing a black and yellow sweater. The former lead singer of the band ‘Police’ is now the Patron of the beekeeping charity, Bees for Development.
Sylvia Plath 1932-
A famous poet of the mid 20th Century and an avid beekeeper in her last years, she wrote a series of powerful poems about bees, and ‘it is the power of the poems to recover the intensity of our first experiences with the bees, the imaginative grasp she has of the special relationship which beekeepers have with each other (at the meetings she attended), her delicate and accurate attention to colour, form, sound, smell, which make them unique in all the literature about bees.’
Lionel Richie
Well, to be honest, it’s his daughter Nicole who was inspired to aquire and place the hives on her Dad’s property. ‘You are forever going to have free personalised honey,’ Nicole told Lionel, holding up a jar with a label reading ‘Hello. Is it bee you’re looking for?’ No-one really knows what Lionel thought.
Pope Francis
Coinciding with his nature, the Patron Saint of Animals, Pope Francis owns several hives on his Vatican farm at Castel Gandolfo. The farm has been earmarked as the Pope’s summer residence since the 16th century. The papal bees aid in the pollination of 800-year-old olive trees and vegetable gardens in the self- sustaining farm.
Pythagoras 570–495 BC
Ancient Greek mathematician and cult founder, when he wasn’t playing with triangles (a^2 + b^2 = c^2 ) he was keeping bees, and contributed his long life to the constant use of honey.
Leo Tolstoy 1828-
This Russian author was a beekeeper. His wife, Sonja, talked about him ‘crouching in front of his hives, net over his head.’ And she wrote in her diary, ‘ The apiary has become the centre of the world for him now, and everybody has to be interested exclusively in Bees!’ Tolstoy mentions beekeeping twice in War and Peace (it’s a long book, you’d expect beekeeping to come up, wouldn’t you?) Tolstoy describes the evacuation of Moscow: ‘Moscow was empty. It was deserted as a dying, queenless hive is deserted.’ ‘One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees...’ – Tolstoy.
Winnie the Pooh
Winnie – an observer of beekeepers (from a-far) and a lover of hunny (from a-close). And why does Pooh like it so much? Well, he’s a bear and ‘bears are known for eating hunny. Besides, who doesn’t love hunny?’
Langstroth 1810-
In 1851, this minister discovered the practical use of Bee-Space and designed the beehive as we commonly know it. Langstroth is credited with discovering ‘bee space’ – an idea that led to his design of freely hanging frames. His 1853 book ‘The Hive and the Honey Bee’ is brilliantly written, and is the first descriptive treatise of modern bee management.
Prodigious Gympie Duplet
The world knows many famous duos – Caesar and Cleopatra, Bonnie and Clyde, Lennon and McCartney, Holmes and Watson, Tom and Jerry, HanSolo and Chewbacca, Laurel and Hardy, Mulder and Scully…but none so famed as right here in our Mary Valley: the BeeKeePingPair of Tom and Athol. This TAB (Two Admired Beekeepers) remains an inspiration to us all.
Brother Adam 1898-
Originally known as Karl Kehrle, Brother Adam was the Benedictine monk who developed the famous Buckfast Bee, and became the leader of a short-lived beekeeping cult movement. He arrived at the Buckfast Catholic monastery when he was 11 years old. He spent the rest of his life there. He was considered one of the most talented of all queen breeders – when he died in 1996, the Economist magazine wrote, ‘He was unsurpassed as a breeder of bees. He talked to them, he stroked them. He brought to the hives a calmness that, according to those who saw him at work, the sensitive bees responded to.’
Charles Dadant 1817-
Progressive beekeeper founded Dadant & Sons, a beekeeping business now entering its seventh generation of family management. Charles Dadant emigrated from France at age 46. He had a big family and no money but worked his way into nine hives of bees in Illinois which grew to thousands. Along the way, he founded a bee supply factory and became a well-known beekeeping author and publisher.
Amos Ives Root 1839-
A. I. Root was an entrepreneur who developed innovative techniques for beekeeping during the latter 19th century, a period when the practice played an important role in the economy of many communities. He went on in 1879 to publish ‘The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture’ which is still successfully in publication.
Emily Dickinson 1830 -
Historical evidence shows Emily Dickinson’s garden was a vast bee and butterfly utopia. Historical evidence shows Emily Dickinson’s Garden contained an abundance of blooming flowers. Archaeologists recently uncovered portions of a pathway leading to nineteenth-century flower and vegetable beds. Emily Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, remembered ‘carpets of lily-of-the-valley and pansies, platoons of sweetpeas, hyacinths, enough in May to give all the bees of summer dyspepsia. There were ribbons of peony hedges and drifts of daffodils in season, marigolds to distraction—... utopia.’
Lady Lamb
Lady Lamb, a contemporary American singer / songwriter, was born Aly Spaltro, but originally changed her stage name to Lady Lamb the Beekeeper , a name which came to her ‘in a dream.’ Honey I’m Home is her recent Buzz-Session Series, recorded live and made by The Wild Honey Pie. Check it out. http://www.thewildhoneypie.com/lady-lamb-the-beekeeper-lakefront-sessions/
Father Bob
Robert John Thomas ‘Bob’ Maguire is a Roman Catholic priest, community worker and media personality from South Melbourne. Commonly known as Father Bob, Maguire was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1989 ‘for service to homeless youth through the Open Family Foundation’. In his younger days he used to be a beekeeper, which he describes as ‘one of the finest periods of my life’.
Daniel David Palmer
Daniel David Palmer or D.D. Palmer was the founder of chiropractic. Palmer was born in Pickering, Canada and in 1865 moved to the United States, and took up magnetic healing.
Bill Dennison
This former Mayor of Toronto and beekeeper had bees before his election. He kept them in the heart of the city. Whenever there was a stray swarm, the police would call His Majesty the Mayor. Dennison would get his veil and go fetch the bees – not every city of 3 million can claim such hands-on care from an elected official!
Yuri Luzhkov
Yuri Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow and a passionate beekeeper. His 18-year rule ended after a Kremlin campaign accused him of caring more for his bee collection than the city’s people.
Rudolf Steiner
In 1923 Rudolf Steiner predicted the dire state of today’s honeybee. He stated that, within fifty to eighty years, we would see the consequences of mechanizing the forces that had previously operated organically in the beehive. Such practices include breeding queen bees artificially. Steiner began a (now famous) series of lectures on bees. From physical depictions of the daily activities of bees to the most elevated esoteric insights, these lectures describe the unconscious wisdom of the beehive and its connection to our experience of health, culture, and the cosmos. The Bee ~ By Emily Dickinson Like trains of cars on tracks of plush I hear the level bee: A jar across the flowers goes, Their velvet masonry Withstands until the sweet assault Their chivalry consumes, While he, victorious, tilts away To vanquish other blooms. His feet are shod with gauze, His helmet is of gold; His breast, a single onyx With chrysoprase, inlaid. His labor is a chant, His idleness a tune; Oh, for a bee’s experience Of clovers and of noon! Bee! I’m expecting you! Bee! I’m expecting you! Was saying Yesterday To Somebody you know That you were due— The Frogs got Home last Week— Are settled, and at work— Birds, mostly back— The Clover warm and thick— You’ll get my Letter by The seventeenth; Reply Or better, be with me— Yours, Fly. ~ By Emily Dickinson
