sugarbush
House Bee
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2011
- Messages
- 481
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Vermont USA
- Hive Type
- Dadant
- Number of Hives
- 0-30 at any given time
The internet age has brought on an interesting era in beekeeping, an era of world wide exchange of information without leaving our homes. This has also brought about the advent of old ideas being re-launched as new. Often these ideas end up getting attributed to a person who isn't the original inventor or theorist of the idea.
The first example I ever noted of this was about a decade ago when a beekeeper in Mountaincamp PA started promoting the feeding of dry sugar to bees as emergency rations. This is a practice that I was taught when I first got into beekeeping 20 years prior and was nothing new to me. But now this practice is being called "Mountiancamp method" or "mountiancamp feeding" in beekeeping communities around the USA.
A couple of years ago I was reading some of Brother Adams works on queen rearing and realized it was nearly identical to the system that many New England Beekeepers use including Micheal Palmer. Mike promotes this system frequently, but does not take credit for it. But other people in the bee community now frequently call it his method. Mike admits that he learned much of how he keeps bees from Charles Mraz, who was well known to travel all over the world while studying different techniques. I assume that the most likely scenario is that Mraz learned directly from Bro Adam and passed the info onto Palmer.
Now Charles Mraz received a beekeeping award in 1992 for pioneering the use of Carbolic Acid to clear honey supers. Here in the USA he is accredited with it's use, but I recently saw on David Cushmans site a reference to it's use for the same purpose dating back to 1901, 4 years before Mraz's birth.
Is it safe to assume that every new technique in beekeeping has been done before?
The first example I ever noted of this was about a decade ago when a beekeeper in Mountaincamp PA started promoting the feeding of dry sugar to bees as emergency rations. This is a practice that I was taught when I first got into beekeeping 20 years prior and was nothing new to me. But now this practice is being called "Mountiancamp method" or "mountiancamp feeding" in beekeeping communities around the USA.
A couple of years ago I was reading some of Brother Adams works on queen rearing and realized it was nearly identical to the system that many New England Beekeepers use including Micheal Palmer. Mike promotes this system frequently, but does not take credit for it. But other people in the bee community now frequently call it his method. Mike admits that he learned much of how he keeps bees from Charles Mraz, who was well known to travel all over the world while studying different techniques. I assume that the most likely scenario is that Mraz learned directly from Bro Adam and passed the info onto Palmer.
Now Charles Mraz received a beekeeping award in 1992 for pioneering the use of Carbolic Acid to clear honey supers. Here in the USA he is accredited with it's use, but I recently saw on David Cushmans site a reference to it's use for the same purpose dating back to 1901, 4 years before Mraz's birth.
Is it safe to assume that every new technique in beekeeping has been done before?
