Observations.

I travelled to Glasgow today for the Scottish Beekeepers Association’s (sic) annual autumn convention. It always annoys me that this august body can neither spell “bee keeper” nor fit the necessary apostrophe into their title. It also grated that the main speaker was Clive de Bruyn who had to start his first talk by explaining how to pronounce his name to the Master of Ceremonies. Clive has been a bee keeper for over 50 years and a leading British bee expert for around half of them.
 
The buffet lunch was held in the library and, on display in a glass case there was this little piece of history. The title of the book, “New Observations on the (Natural History of) Bees” is a little curious since Huber, the author and scientist behind it was blind and so was relating the observations made by his servant, Francois Burnens. At the time of the French revolution (1789) they were discovering that the queen bee mated in flight and not in the hive; this was more than a hundred years before Maurice Maeterlinck in his learned treatise, “The Life of the Bee,” repeatedly referred to the king bee. Huber’s and Burnens’ meticulous scientific studies paved the way for modern understanding of the honey bee, which was not so surprising since Huber grew up in a family that was steeped in very advanced scientific research for its time.