04 Thursday Nov 2021
Posted in beekeeping, beekeeping history
Henry David Thoreau
There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.
Henry David Thoreau
26 Thursday Nov 2020
Posted in beekeeping
from Letters to Various Persons, Ticknor and Fields, 1865, p. 145:
“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising low contented one can be with nothing definite only a sense of existence. Well anything for variety I am ready to try this for the next ten thousand years and exhaust it. How sweet to think of my extremities well charred and my intellectual part too so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague, indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.”
Thoreau on Bees:
Thoreau was surprised at the distance to which the village bees go for flowers.
“The rambler in the most remote woods and pastures little thinks that the bees which are humming so industriously on the rare wild flowers he is plucking for his herbarium, in some out-of-the-way nook, are, like himself, ramblers from the village, perhaps from his own yard, come to get their honey for his hives…I felt the richer for this experience. It taught me that even the insects in my path are not loafers, but have their special errands. Not merely and vaguely in this world, but in this hour, each is about its business.” – The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
25 Wednesday Nov 2020
Posted in bee lining, beekeeping
Sept. 30, 1852, was a fine clear day, and Henry David Thoreau decided to go bee hunting. He ended up feeling richer for the experience, and not just because of the honey.
He was 35 years old, living in Concord, Mass., as the town’s principled eccentric. Two years earlier he had published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but it wasn’t a success. He had finished his sojourn in the woods, though he had yet to publish his masterpiece, Walden.
He had already spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax as a protest against slavery and the Mexican War. He was hiding escaped slaves in his family’s home and taking long walks in the surrounding woods and fields.
He recorded in great detail his observations of nature in his journal. On the day he went bee hunting, he described how he went with three friends in a wagon to Fair Haven Pond. They brought with them their bee-hunting apparatus: a small round tin box and a small wooden box.
At first they had no luck, as they couldn’t find flowers. The goldenrods were dried up and the asters were scarce. They tried the pond, a brook and a tree where Thoreau had found a bees’ nest that summer. No luck. And then,
Read the full article here: New England Historical Society
Beekeeping365 