California Beekeeping History

   The following are some interesting quotes from this very interesting article I found the other day.

   On March 14th, 1853, the first 12 honeybee colonies to reach California arrived in San Francisco aboard the steamship "Isthmus," brought by a botanist named Christopher A. Shelton.

   "From the apiary [J. S. Harbison] established on the east bank of the Sacramento River in Sutterville he sold, by the first of April, 1858, sixteen of his colonies for one hundred dollars gold each." Holy crap! How much would that have been worth in 2008 dollars? To put this in perspective it is mentioned elsewhere that hives on the East Coast where bees were plentiful were going for $5 each. Also, today a hive goes for appx $100 2008 dollars (can vary a lot depending on a lot of things though).

...

   "...word got around that Harbison had grossed nearly $30,000.00 [!!] from the sale of bees in 1859. This touched off the greatest mass movement of honey­bee colonies the world has ever seen. During the winter of 1859 and I860 it is estimated that between seven and ten thousand colonies were brought to California, most of them being shipped from New York Harbor and all traveling via the Isthmus of Panama Route. [also this is before the canal.. they were somehow hauled overland across the isthmus!]

   The California newspapers called it the "bee fever," stating that every steamship arriving in San Francisco had beehives piled on its decks. Over one thousand colonies arrived during the last week in January, 1860; the "Sonora" docked on Friday with four hundred hives aboard and the "Orizaba" arrived the following Monday with six hundred and fifty more.

   Drawn by the magic name of Harbison, a large percentage of the importers took their bees directly to Sacramento. That spring at least one thousand hives of bees were located on vacant lots in the city, becoming soon a public nuisance.

   These large imports broke the market and by January some hives were selling for as low as four dollars each. Harbison, with his established reputation, kept selling his bees for one hundred dollars each until early September when he announced that he would lower his price to eighty dollars."

...

   "There had been complaints that honey­bees were a public nuisance in the City of San Diego as early as September 1, 1876, as well as the charge that they were destroying fruit on the trees. It was in the fall of 1884 that the conflicting interests of the beekeepers and fruit growers became acute upon the filing of a law suit [...]. The result of this suit and another against the beekeeper Gustave Bohn, of San Bernardino County, in the fall of 1885 convinced the fruitgrowers that they were right, though evidence by experts had been presented in the Bohn trial demonstrating that honeybees could not harm grapes or fruits with unbroken skins.

   Some of the fruit growers became impatient with the slow processes of the law, and as the number of beekeepers refused to move, there occurred a number of night raids with kerosene and matches, and several apiaries were destroyed by arson. Mr. Harbison, in the same letter in the American Bee Journal quoted above, wrote that within one year he had lost about 350 hives from arson and had killed or broken up 700 more to pacify the fruit men."

...

   "John S. Harbison stands unique among American beekeepers for he was a pioneer in three basic facets of what has been called, "the Golden Age of American Beekeeping." He was a major contributor to the theory of bee culture with his inventions and in his development of new tools and methods that characterized the remarkable advances made in nineteenth century apicultural science. Secondly, he had the genius to put his theories into practice and become the largest producer of honey in the World during the 1870's; and thirdly, it was he who opened up the great retail markets east of the Mississippi needed to absorb the tremendous honey crops produced in California.

   Truly, Harbison was worthy of the title often bestowed upon him during his life time by the Press as well as by members of the bee industry-"King of the Beekeepers."

--- All excerpts (well the first is a paraphrase) from "John S. Harbison: Pioneer San Diego Beekeeper" by Lee Watkins, formerly of the UC Davis Bee Research Facility.