A NEW ZEALAND BEE LIBRARY

Turnbull Library Record, Volume IX, 1 September 1952, Page 7

A NEW ZEALAND BEE LIBRARY

IT IS NOW SOME YEARS SINCE Mr. E. A. EaRP, UPON HIS retirement from the post of Senior Apiarist of the Department of Agriculture, presented to the Library, as a memorial to his wife, his collection of works on bees and bee-lore.

This comprised about 400 volumes, constituting a strong working collection, with a number of works interesting and valuable as a supplement to works already on the library’s shelves that the practical bee expert had deemed scarcely necessary. In 1949, when an exhibition of selected material was prepared for a meeting of the Wellington Bee Circle, the strength of the collection became apparent.

The Rev. W. C. Cotton, a Church Missionary Society clergyman who came to New Zealand with Bishop Selwyn, published the first New Zealand book on the subject Manual for New Zealand Beekeepers at Wellington in 1848. In 1842 he had produced a very scholarly and delightful volume— Bee Book in London. This was full of old-time bee-lore, reproducing large portions of several eighteenth-century works. From the German he translated in 1872 a quaint little book called Buzz, a Buzz. ' ’ ' 1

In 1849 a small booklet in the Maori tongue was issued from St. John’s College, apparently written by Cotton, with the title Ko Nga Pi. Bees seem to have been introduced by Miss Bumby, sister of the Rev. J. H. Bumby, of the Wesleyan Mission (D.N.Z.8., i, 120). Up till this time there had been only the indigenous bees that were not the kind to store honey in quantity.

In 1868 Chapman, the enterprising Auckland publisher, issued a little book How to Manage the Honey Bee in New Zealand and in 1881 Isaac Hopkins published at Thames his New Zealand Bee Manual. Hopkins was a force in the apiary world for many years, commencing in 1883 the New Zealand and Australian Bee Journal , the first of its kind.

For many years Mr. Earp’s own book, Beekeeping in New Zealand , issued as a bulletin of the Department of Agriculture, has been the standard New Zealand work on its subject.

The exhibition of 1949 was able to include a number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of classical treatises, such as those of Aristotle, Varro, Columella and Vergil, the latter in the Leyden edition of 1517, with its delightful woodcuts. The Feminine Monarchy (1634) by Charles Butler has especial significance for its phonetic, orthography. Butler was something of a philologist, and applied his ideas in this edition. An earlier one, that of 1623, is also in the library, but this was not the vehicle of his theories. A very curious part of his book is the bee song, a stave of musical notes arranged in triple time to represent the humming of bees at swarming. Butler was vicar of Laurence-Wotton and the author of Rhetoricae Libri (1629), an English Grammar (1633), and The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting (1636).

Huber, a Swiss, was the first to observe and record the process of mating of the queen bee, which invariably occurs in lofty flight, and the first English edition of his book appeared in Edinburgh in 1806. To sweep across the years, perhaps the next most notable contribution to the subject, was in 1938, when K. von Frisch presented his paper on The Language of Bees in the Smithsonian Report of that year. Many popular works of course dealt with bees. We

showed Barnaby Googe’s Whole Art and Trade of Husbandry (1614) with its section “entreating of bees”; and William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (1838). The modern classics, such as Maeterlinck’s Life of The Bee , Fabre’s Bramble Bees , Ticknor Edwardes’s Beemaster of Warrilow , and Michelet’s The Insect took their rightful places. Some attractive illustrated versions of HLsop’s Fables, such as Barlow’s of 1687 and Bewick’s of 1820, together with several engravings of old skeps and coloured honey flowers in old herbals, added interest to the cases.

Imagination was allowed a little sway by admitting John Oxenham’s Bees in Amber , Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of The Bees , and Wings and Stings , a Tale for The Young , by A.L.O.E. (1895). Here also we placed White’s Natural History of Selborne for its reference to the simpleton whose obsession was bees, and Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth for its intimate glimpse of the mystic regard of the countryman for his bees. The exhibit contained many other items, but these notes will suffice to show the interest and value of such a collection, a worthy memorial to the wife of its donor.