BEE KEEPING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 83 



shown by a letter of a father to his son, dated, " Sutton [Massa- 

 chusetts] June the 2d, 1788." a Besides speaking of sending to his son 

 some homespun clothes the father adds, " as for news w r e have no 

 grate to rite to you our bees have swormed yesterday and they flew of 

 today." 



New England is reputed to have suffered severely from attacks of 

 bee moths in the early part of the nineteenth century. There appears 

 to have been a period of general devastation by this enemy from 

 about 1800 to 1850. It handicapped the industry considerably, and, 

 according to some, completely wiped it out in certain localities. Writ- 

 ing from Greenfield in 1853, L. L. Langstroth says : d " The present 

 condition of practical bee keeping in this country [meaning the whole 

 of New England and New York] is known to be deplorably low. 

 From the great mass of agriculturalists * * * it received not 

 the slightest attention." There is room for considerable doubt, how- 

 ever, whether the moth was the primary cause of this devastation, as 

 is explained below under the headings,* " Enemies " and " Disease." 



At the middle of the nineteenth century Langstroth, who had been 

 experimenting for several years, brought out his invention, the 

 movable-frame hive. As is explained under the head of " Hives," 

 this revolutionized the industry; at that time modern bee keeping 

 began. 



Considering the very early date of the first introduction of bees 

 to what is now Massachusetts, and that from this locality as a center 

 much of the present-day bee keeping c spread westward with the 

 home seekers, it is not a little surprising to discover so few extensive 

 bee keepers in Massachusetts, while there are many in New York 

 and Vermont. Compensating, however, for the lack of extensive 

 bee keepers, there is a vast number of small apiaries; their number 

 in proportion to the territory is probably greater than in any other 

 State in the Union. There are at least 2,100 * who derive some profit 

 from their bees. Were these 2,100 to keep twenty-five colonies each 



fl A photograph of this letter is in the possession of the writer. 



& Langstroth, L. L. 1S53. Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee, a 

 Bee-Keeper's Manual. Northampton. First edition. 



c The details of the present status of bee keeping in this paper are based 

 upon the returns from a series of questions sent to every known bee keeper 

 in Massachusetts. The methpd of securing the statistics was described in the 

 author's paper read before the Association of Economic Entomologists, Balti- 

 more, Md., December 29, 1908. This paper is published in the Journal of 

 Economic Entomology, Vol. II, No. 2, pp. 117-120, April, 1909. 



<* By actual count, the recorded bee keepers for Massachusetts number 2,127. 

 This exceeds the number recorded in the 1900 census by 328, which, consider- 

 ing that the author's work was accomplished through mail while the federal 

 census is the result of a house-to-house canvass, suggests a deficiency in the 

 figures of the federal census reports. Of the 2,127, 1,050 reported. 



