By Pat Murkland
Surely you’ve heard people rhapsodizing about “saving the bees.” Yet many honey bees buzzing around Southern California’s Native American homelands and throughout North America are not native.
How did we get all these honey bees from Europe and Asia? Curiosity led News from Dorothy Ramon Learning Center this week to explore the honey bees’ pivotal role in the history of Southern California, and their relationship with the First Nations.
Bees on Board
Western honey bees first came to North America about 400 years ago, sailing with the first colonists from England to Virginia. Bees were a must-have for colonists: Honey was an energy food, a sweetener, and also valued as medicine, as it is today. Beeswax made candles and was used in other crucial ways. Most importantly, because the bees pollinated essential crops back home in England, they were brought along to do the same job in North America.1 They still do this job today.
From those first hives, the honey bees quickly spread throughout the East, including feral bees that settled colonies throughout Native American homelands. By the time the United States of America formed in 1776, the imported honey bees were as established across the East as the human colonists.
Honey Bees Invade California
As immigrants moved West, they brought their honey bees with them. The bees weren’t up for the rigors of a wagon trail ride, but they did manage to survive in ship holds where they could be kept cool and more dormant, and fed with their own honey. By the 1860s and 1870s, honey bees were flourishing in California.
“A California bee ranch: hunting wild bees and bee culture,” Harper’s Weekly, 1881, Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material, BANC PIC 1963.002:0001-1886, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Already Southern California Native American homelands had been altered by cattle of missions and ranchos. The roaming, unfenced cattle competed with wild animals — and Native Americans — for vital plant foods. As we reported in “Horses”, by the 1830s, varied counts place a half-million cattle in California, and non-native plant invaders such as black mustard already were overtaking native plants.2 Honey bees, by the way, like black mustard.
Then people began setting out hundreds of bee boxes in the canyons and foothills.
Circa 1877 or 1880, an apiary at Sierra Madre Villa, San Gabriel. Note the blooming native yucca. Description: “Several rows of hive boxes stacked three high related to the beekeeping business of the Sierra Madre Villa hotel in San Gabriel (now Sierra Madre, California). A man stands on the right, holding the sides of one of the boxes. … [Photographer Carleton E.] Watkins made two trips to Southern California, in 1877 and 1880.” (Stereograph courtesy of The Huntington Library, Carleton E. Watkins Photo)
This matters because the native pollinators, which include native bees, other insects such as moths and beetles, birds such as hummingbirds, and animals such as bats, have specific roles vital to all plant life. Certain wild plants cannot reproduce without their relationships with specific pollinators.3
As Native Americans lost their homelands to masses of newcomers, the landscapes of native pollinators also became dominated by the imported honey bees. Even today honey bees continue to pollinate and spread non-native plants throughout the wilderness, and have been documented monopolizing and damaging native plant reproduction as they dominate the wild bee populations. 4
Another view of the apiary at Sierra Madre Villa, San Gabriel. Note the blooming native yucca that’s taller than the man standing in foreground. Description: “Close view of rows of hive boxes set up at the bottom of a hillside related to the beekeeping business of the Sierra Madre Villa hotel in San Gabriel (now Sierra Madre, California). An older man stands to the lower right of frame, with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background. … [Photographer Carleton E.] Watkins made two trips to Southern California, in 1877 and 1880.” (Stereograph courtesy of The Huntington Library, Carleton E. Watkins Photo)
The Beekeepers’ Sting
As you’d expect, honey bees flourished with the rise in the late 1800s of Southern California’s fruit and nut industries. But there also was a huge upsurge in beekeepers. For example, when Riverside County formed in 1893 from chunks of San Diego and Los Angeles counties, the business directories for the new county were dominated by nearly 100 beekeepers, by far the most popular profession listed.5
J.E. Pleasants (standing near wagon) began beekeeping around 1868 in Santiago Canyon and what is now known as Modjeska Canyon in Orange County. He served as president of the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, was elected president of the Southern California Beekeepers Association in 1880, and in 1884 supervised the California bee exhibit at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Exposition in New Orleans. In 1902 he became Orange County’s first bee inspector. (Courtesy of UC Irvine Regional History Collection, Pleasants Family)
Southern California’s climate beckoned to people who were sick with tuberculosis and other lung diseases. Thousands of newcomers came seeking health. As a result, 1870s-80s Southern California had more white-collar professions than it knew what to do with. “The towns and country are overstocked with lawyers, doctors, merchants, and clerks, so there is not much room for these,” the Los Angeles Herald newspaper reported on Nov. 25, 1874. 6
One attractive career to invalids or jobless white-collar workers was beekeeping: “As profits mounted, the increasing number of health seekers turning to the new occupation found the work exceedingly light, suited even to old people, its initial cost low, and the upkeep practically nil. There were no irrigation worries, either, for the beekeeper.”7
Honey was the new gold. In 1871, for example, 168,000 lbs. of honey shipped from Los Angeles County yielded nearly $12,000,8 which my online calculator claims would have an income value today of more than $2 million. By 1884, more than one million pounds of honey were shipped from San Diego harbor alone.9
Many families eventually had their own hives. So did Native American families. Katherine Siva Saubel remembered in 1999 that in her early childhood in Los Coyotes Reservation, her father’s bee hives produced honey. 10
Early hive for honey bees, Orange County, circa 1890-1939, (Courtesy of UC Irvine Regional History Collection, Pleasants Family)
To be continued.
Thank you!
Stay tuned for Part 2.
Dorothy Ramon Learning Center, led by Elder Ernest Siva (Cahuilla-Serrano), is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that saves and shares Southern California Native American cultures, languages, history, and traditional arts. We welcome your donations. (MORE INFO.) We welcome your EMAIL. Thank you from Editor Pat Murkland, April 6, 2022.
Ordal, Hailey, “This Land of Milk and Honey: How the Honey Bee Shaped America,”
4-H third-place essay, 2014, for the Foundation for the Preservation of Honey Bees, Inc.
Minnich, Richard A., California’s Fading Wildflowers: Lost Legacy and Biological Invasions, © 2008 by the Regents of the University of California, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London.
Asbell, Madena, “Know Your Desert Pollinators and the Plants They Rely On,” April 9, 2020, online article for Mojave Desert Land Trust.
Hung Keng-Lou, James, Jennifer M. Kingston, Adrienne Lee, David A. Holway, and Joshua R. Kohn, 2019, University of California, San Diego, “Non-native honey bees disproportionately dominate the most abundant floral resources in a biodiversity hotspot,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B., 2862018290120182901, http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.2901
Bynon, A.A. and Son, History and Directory of Riverside County, 1893-4, published 1893, reprinted 1992, with a foreword by Robert Fitch and an introduction by Tom Patterson, © Historical Commission Press, Riverside, California.
Quoted by Baur, John E., The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870-1900, © 1959 Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, second edition, paperback 2010, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, p. 50.
Ibid., pp 111-112.
Henderson, Jaime, “The L.A. Bees.” California History, vol. 91, no. 3, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2014.91.3.6. pp. 6–18, Accessed 6 Apr. 2022.
Baur, John E., The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870-1900, pp 114-115.
Personal communication, Pat Murkland, 1999.