Over the Thanksgiving Holiday I spent time with friends and family and had a thoroughly enjoyable break away from the office. I traveled to the west coast and while there visited the largest Renaissance Fair I’ve ever seen and took some time to talk to the owner of a beekeeper’s supply company in downtown San Francisco. Some of that will be in the webinar you see advertised elsewhere in this issue.
One evening, after a large and delicious meal of leftovers we sat around, all of the family folks here, and talked about pets. Dogs, cats, birds . . . mostly dogs.
I haven’t had much contact with dogs for the last twenty years or so…I had several after high school and during college, but since then I’m gone more than not and taking care of a pooch is problematic when you’re not home. Or expensive. Or a real test of who your friends are. Don’t get me wrong, I like dogs and I like visiting friends that have them, but it just wouldn’t be fair to a dog to have one in my home.
The friends and family I spent time with aren’t fanatics by any stretch, but they do care about their animals. But in the 25 years I’ve been dogless the care and feeding of these animals has changed it seems. Now, if you’ve been keeping pets all this time and have kept up with the latest in animal husbandry then you already know where I’m going. Animals that live with people generally get medical and dietary care comparable to what you and I get. Well, not quite maybe . . . but it is certainly far more complicated, sophisticated, advanced, and expensive than when I had a pooch. Of course the science of caring for dogs has advanced a lot too. A whole lot. As a result, pet owners have the opportunity to take better care of their pets . . . cancer treatments, a million special diets available at the pet store, targeted medications, surgery for all manner of ailments, and insurance to cover all this is available too. But better care comes with a price. The price is actual dollars and in time invested in the care.
I was fascinated as I listened to the stories of aging animals and the ailments they had and the care they were given, of young animals and the treatments required for genetic disorders they inherited from inbreeding selection and regular shortcomings of a particular breed, and the money people spent, time they took and work they did to help their dogs recover from a multitude of unfortunate or even necessary incidents – from injuries received at dog parks in the city to microchip embedding procedures, to vitamin supplements and other medications given on a daily, sometimes several times daily basis for allergies, pests, predators and diseases. Truly, I’ve been out of the canine loop.
Interestingly, you won’t be surprised, the care and feeding of our bees has followed a similar curve. When I started learning of honey bees and what few problems they had back before the mites and the new fangled pesticides and exotic diseases and traveling work schedules and weather patterns and mononculture diet dominance and the plethora of viruses all present today . . . why, yes, beekeeping was different. But life was different then . . . everything was different then…or, at least it seems that way, doesn’t it?
After listening to all the stories and tales of what pet owners go through today, compared to what I had to do way back when I had responsibility for a dog . . . well, I wonder . . . do I want to start up again? Or, like all those family folks…you do what you have to do if you want a pooch. Or a box of bees.
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We begin our yearlong series looking at the life and work of L. L. Langstroth this month with an informative and fact-filled piece by Marc Hoffman. Marc, if you missed his introduction earlier, is certainly what I would consider a Langstroth Scholar . . . having studied and researched the great man’s life, his background and history, and his philosophy. He’s an accomplished actor, and as a playwright has written and performed a one-man play on LLL’s life during and after his discoveries entitled 'Beeman.' We are fortunate to be one of the first to publish many of Marc’s discoveries and we are pleased to share them with you. One exciting discovery presented in this article is a photo of LLL’s wife. We discovered it while looking for something quite different when putting together the last edition of our ABC. It was originally published in Gleanings back in 1875, and we are very pleased to be able to share this discovery with you now.
As stated in Marc’s article he will have more of LLL’s story and background later this year so please watch for these additional articles.
Next month we have some work by Roger Hoopingarner, another LLL scholar and retired Michigan State Extension Specialist in Apiculture, who not long ago took the third edition of LLL’s Hive And The Honey Bee and annotated it in detail, looking at the discoveries LLL made, some assumptions he got right, and some not. He, too, will have several contributions so please watch for those during the coming year.
Later this year Tammy Horn, author of Bees In America, A History of the Honey Bee in America, and Piping Up (not yet released), a history of the role of women in American beekeeping will make some observations on what women were doing during the time LLL was around, and some notes on Mrs. LLL, an under-appreciated personality in the development of American beekeeping.
Later this year we also have Gene Kritsky, from the University Of Cincinnati, author of The Quest for the Perfect Hive to be released very soon (and reviewed here), and Jim Tew, Bee Culture columnist and curator of the beekeeping equipment museum in Wooster, Ohio, and a student in the construction of early hives and other beekeeping equipment, presenting information on the history and evolution of hives up to and including LLL’s box.
Wrapping all this up next December, the actual month of LLL’s birth, the Entomological Society Of America is sponsoring a symposium looking at the contributions of LLL to modern entomology, and to beekeeping in general. We hope to be a part of that celebration, too.
What a year we have planned! A year of discovery and rediscovery, a year of new information and a review of what we thought we knew, but maybe didn’t. A two hundredth anniversary only comes around once in our lifetime . . . don’t miss a moment of this year’s journey.
Happy New Year!!
