My father, Onslow Robinson, was an MIT graduate, a registered engineer in two states, but held to the ideal that a family should be largely self-sufficient. Perhaps this was an outcome of the great depression. He read books like Five Acres and Independence, a Handbook for Small Farm Management by Maurice G. Kains. We usually had a large garden, and canned some of the crop for the winter. We kept enough chickens to supply our eggs and an occasional chicken dinner. He had a steel shoe-last to enable him to repair our shoes and get a few extra weeks or months out of them. And at our Shively, Kentucky home we took up beekeeping, I believe even before the WW II sugar rationing which started in May 1943.
Not in a big way. We had up to four hives, and we all became amateur apiarists, somewhat expert in tending the hives. We received surprisingly few stings, and learned to remove the stinger immediately to minimize the venom. We got hats with veils to protect the face and neck At that time, you could buy a swarm of bees, or an extra queen, from Sears Roebuck.
At some point I read a story, perhaps in a “Tom Swift” book or some other boy’s adventure yarn, which included an episode in which our hero saved the day by capturing a migrating warm of bees which had collected in a tree and was frightening the nearby residents.
This exact scenario soon unfolded for me. Some friends of mine ran a trailer park (it would now be called a mobile-home park) about two miles from our home. They knew we kept bees, so one day we got this frantic call about a swarm of bees on a tree in their park, terrifying their tenants. My father was sympathetic, but had no idea how to help. I told him about the story I had read, and he agreed to give it a try.
On arriving, we sprinkled water on the swarm, because, according to the book, they won’t fly when they think it’s raining. It seemed to work. So far, so good.
Then we took a bed sheet and enclosed the swarm, tying it tightly to the branch between the tree trunk and the enclosed swarm. Then we sawed off the branch, and took it home in our Ford Model-A truck. I believe we did all this without getting stung.
Fortunately, we had an empty hive ready for them. We had a smoke generator, and used that to stupefy the bees so they could be handled. We found the queen, and temporarily isolated her in a small cage, knowing that the swarm would not move on and abandon their queen. The new residents became a productive swarm, and the trailer park owner, Mr. Parkhurst, was very grateful.
We kept bees for a few years – perhaps until I left for the army. We had honey for ourselves, and sold some to our neighbors. Mother baked a lot; pies, cakes, donuts, etc. She learned to substitute honey for sugar in her recipes.
I doubt that the whole enterprise could be called profitable, but with free labor (myself and my brother Albert) it helped us to overcome the WW II sugar shortage, and perhaps move in the direction of family self-sufficiency.
Tags: non-engineering