[SDCBeeks] Aligning the Bees

[John Harvey]

This note is not about beekeeping but someone might find the information
interesting.  I have been working on a presentation of a particular
expedition to the Wind River Mountains and the Mountain Man Rendezvous of
1837.  Beaver fur was traded during the rendezvous and was a commodity
something like Bitcoin today.

In my search I came across the image below titled "Aligning the Bees."  The
trappers and outfitters would capture bees and then release them one at a
time following them to their hive.  The artist was Alfred Jacob Miller, a
Baltimore artist hired by Sir Willian Drummond Stewart (The heir of the
English Steward Family) to accompany the expedition and record the images.
Honey and beeswax were valuable commodities in America and especially on
the frontier.  I haven't been able to identify the person chasing the bees
to their hive, but the image in white standing by the fire is Stewart.  Jim
Bridger, and Sacajawea ( One of the guides on the Lewis & Clark Expedition)
was on this journey as well as her son Charbonneau who was born on the 1804
Expedition.

The words below are from "The History of Bees in America."

*Edwin James, in his account of S.H. Long’s expedition to the Rocky
Mountains in 1819-1820, describes finding a swarm of bees in a cottonwood
tree along the Arkansas River. He writes: “These useful insects reminded us
of the comforts and luxuries of life among men, and at the same time gave
us the assurance that we were drawing near the abodes of civilization.
Bees, it is said by the hunters and the Indians, are rarely if ever seen
more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles in advance of the
white settlements” (160). Josiah Gregg, also travelling in Arkansas between
1831 and 1839, reports that the honey bee had advanced “to the distance of
two or three hundred miles west of the Missouri and Arkansas frontier” *

[image: Harvey-4.jpg]
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