Mann launches online beekeeping literature library

"The Hive and the Honeybee," a new digital library devoted to beekeeping literature, was launched this spring by Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library. Currently at 10 volumes, the site http://bees.library.cornell.edu offers free Internet access to the most significant titles from the E.F. Phillips Beekeeping Collection at Cornell.

In 1925, Everett Franklin Phillips, an apiculture professor at Cornell, started what is today one of the largest repositories of beekeeping literature in the world. "I wish to create an accessible storehouse of our knowledge of bees and beekeeping," he said at the time, reflecting his interest in directing people to the collective wisdom of beekeeping's elders.

But accessing such a print collection has always required being in Ithaca. And as the classics in the field have gone out of print and become hot collector items on Ebay, they are even harder to get one's hands on. "Some beekeepers I've talked to haven't even heard of these books," said Mike Griggs, the former president of the Eastern Apiculture Society (EAS) and one of the site's principal organizers and promoters. Using the Internet to help people discover and read these classics is one of the central goals of "The Hive and Honeybee."

The project got off the ground in the fall of 2002, when the Eastern Apiculture Society donated $200 to digitize Langstroth on the Hive and the Honeybee, an 1853 work by the father of modern beekeeping, L.L. Langstroth. The society also offered to match the first $1,000 donated by the beekeeping community, and in less than a year a variety of individuals and beekeepers associations fully met their challenge.

What's online now and what will be down the road are the result of a careful review of the literature by scholars, who produced a ranked list of the 90 most important works in the history of modern beekeeping. The top 10 went up first and represent the founding fathers of the field. In addition to Langstroth, they include people like G.M. Doolittle, the father of commercial queen bee rearing; the Rev. Jan Dzierson, father of modern European beekeeping; and Moses Quinby, inventor of the first practical smoker and the father of modern commercial beekeeping.

Dewey Caron, a professor of apiculture at the University of Delaware, was one of the reviewers for the site. For him, this collection is a history whose real value will come from being read and used by beekeepers. "Digitizing helps make the record much more useful," Caron said. "It expands from just scholars to others who might have interests and helps to enable them to gain meaningful access."

A work in progress, "The Hive and the Honeybee" will expand as funding permits, and it is hoped that eventually all 90 titles can find their way online. Recently, the Tampa Bay Beekeepers Association donated $1,000 and offered another $1,000 as a challenge grant through December 2004. If fully met, their donation and challenge will allow for 12 more volumes to be digitized, including old favorites such as John S. Harbison's The Bee-keepers Directory, or the Theory and Practice of Bee Culture (1861) and T.W. Cowan's Waxcraft, All About Beeswax (1908).

To find out more about this growing collection and how to support it, contact Janet McCue, the director of Mann Library, at 255-2285 or jam7@cornell.edu or Eveline Ferretti, special projects coordinator, at 254-4993 or ef15@cornell.edu.