- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Picture this: George Washington (Feb. 22, 1732-Dec. 14, 1799) is eating hoecakes with honey, and adding honey to his tea, something that historians say he did every day.
Historians also relate that Washington not only loved honey, but he kept bees at his Mount Vernon estate to pollinate the fruits and vegetables. He was among the first to keep his bees in wooden boxes "as opposed to the traditional black gum hives," according to the Presidential History of Honey Bees.
Washington described his bee hives as "bee houses." On July 28, 1782, Washington gave "300 nails at the Circle Storehouse to an indentured English joiner named Matthew Baldridge, to make a bee house," according to George Washington: Bee Keeper.
As Apis mellifera enthusiasts know, European colonists brought the first honey bees to America in 1622 to the Jamestown colony, Virginia. They kept the bees in skeps. When the bees swarmed to tree hollows, the settlers--including my Revolutionary War/East Coast ancestors--became quite adept at locating "bee trees."
So did other generations.
My first cousin, the late Gordon Rowe, a Cooperative Extension economist at UC Berkeley, remembers the feral bee colony hunts with my grandfather, Robert Keatley (1853-1938) in Cowlitz County, Wash.
"We would stop every so often along the creek where there was sort of a quiet place in the water and look at the bees that had stopped for water," Rowe said. "He would look for bees that were carrying a lot of pollen on their legs. Then he would look to see what direction those bees had flown to."
Voila! He'd find the bee tree.
"July was blackberry picking time and we often found these bee trees. Personally I found two in one season—one showed the marks of a bear trying to claw into it. What attracted my attention was the hum that was present, like a high-tension wire—so out of place. The hum came from the bees fanning the nectar with their wings until it reached honey consistency."
"These burned over areas were prime sources of nectar from the fireweed—hundreds of acres," Martin continued. "Another way of tracking bees was to visit their watering holes. Dad and I went into the hills which were drainage for Cannonball Creek (named for the many cannonball shaped rocks, often with a fossilized clam shell at the center). Following the creek to its source near the Black Timber, seepage formed many small puddles that the bees loaded up on. We found two possibles and went in for one in the fall."
"Come fall we were set up for our honey. We didn't have to smoke out the bees, for they were being robbed by a more vigorous hive nearby, high in an old snag. The bee hive we robbed had a long hole, difficult to protect, and the bees had had all the fight taken out of them. We had a generous amount of honey, and the darkness of some of the comb wax told us that it had existed for many years. The following year, the second tree was harvested, but the snag had to be felled."
"One blackberry-picking season in the Black Timber, my dad came upon a bee tree and carved his initials in it," she wrote. "In those days, such a mark would be honored by others. In the fall, Uncle Pete (Laughlin), my dad and I returned for a very rewarding cache. I personally carried out a 5-gallon can on my back, and the other two probably had double that amount. To extract the honey, it was crushed and permitted to drain in a strainer. It keeps indefinitely."
"Wax is a product that bees exude from their bodies—peeled off for the comb. The wax was saleable to be used for candles, cleaning sadirons, waxing thread forms, etc. After the honey was drained from the crushed comb, the comb was mixed with water and heated slightly to melt it. To get the pure wax, Mother would then dip her hand into cold water, then into the melting mixture, then back to cold water, and then peel the wax off her hand."
Imagine what it was like to live in those times...

- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
And the yellow.
On a camping trip last week to Doran Regional Park, Bodega Bay, we admired our neighbors' display of American flags—bordered with a dozen honey bees.
These bees, however, didn't buzz. They spun.
The colorful yellow, black and white mobiles attacked the wind like fierce little windmills, livening up the campground.
“Are you beekeepers?” I asked the neighbor.
“No,” she replied. “We just like bees.”
So did George Washington (1732-1799), the founding father of our country.
Mount Vernon research historian Mary Thompson notes that George Washington was the first U.S. president to keep bees. In Washingtonpapers.org, she writes that his "indentured English joiner," Matthew Baldridge, received 300 nails at the Circle Storehouse on July 28, 1787 "to make a bee house."
"Two days later, Matthew received another 200 nails for the same project," Thompson notes. "In addition to getting honey from his own bees, George Washington is known to have purchased honey, as well as other foodstuffs such as chickens, eggs, vegetables, and fruit from his slaves. Honey, for example, was acquired at various times from Nat (a blacksmith); Davy, who was an enslaved overseer;and carpenters Sambo an Isaac, indicating that they, too, probably kept bees."
Thompson says President Washington also liked cake spread with honey and butter: "A visitor from Poland reported that Washington had “tea and caks (sic) made from maize; because of his teeth he makes slices spread with butter and honey….”
And, according to step-granddaughter Nelly Custis, Washington "ate three small mush cakes (Indian meal) swimming in butter and honey," and "drank three cups of tea without cream."
The founding father also liked gifts of honey. Knowing his fondness for honey, sister Betty Washington Lewis gifted him with a "large Pot of very fine in the Comb," when the president was recovering from a serious illness.
The Mount Vernon research historian also relates: "At the close of Washington's presidency eight years later, among the many things the family packed to ship back to Mount Vernon from Philadelphia was 'one demijohn with honey.' A demijohn was a very large glass bottle, covered with wickerwork."
Honey for the hoecakes, hoecakes swimming in honey...


- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Historians agree that the infamous story about George Washington cutting down his father's favorite cherry tree and then admitting it ("I cannot tell a lie") is probably just that--a story. A myth. Didn't happen.
At age 6, George Washington reportedly got a little hatchet-happy and started chopping down every thing in sight. At least that's what biographer Parson Weems wrote in telling a story supposedly related to him by an elderly woman, maybe a cousin, maybe a neighbor, maybe not. Historians say there's no proof young George did that; and that Weems made up the story, later printed in a McGuffey Reader, to encourage children to always tell the truth.
So there you have it: Weems made up the story to get young children to always tell the truth.
As we all know, young George Washington (Feb. 22, 1732-Dec. 14, 1799) went on to become the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, 1775–1783, and then the founding president of the United States, serving from 1789 until 1797.
We don't know much about George Washington's early life, but we do know that as an adult, he kept bees--bees that pollinated his fruit trees, including apples, pears, plums, and cherries. We do know that honey bees were here 110 years before young George was born; European colonists brought the honey bee to America (to the Jamestown colony, Virginia) in 1622.
Some tall tales also exist about bees during the American Revolutionary War. According to a fictional story first published in the Sunday School Advocate and then reprinted in the September 1917 in the American Bee Journal, 12-year-old beekeeper Charity Crabtree was tending her father's bees when she encountered a wounded soldier who told her to ride his horse to Gen. Washington's camp, just outside Philadelphia, and warn him about the impending attack by Gen. Charles Cornwallis.
However, before she could ride off, the British surrounded her and yelled “Ho, there! Stop, girl, or by heaven we'll make you!”
The story continues: "Suddenly, with the entrance of the soldiers, the bees began to buzz with a cannon's roar, as if to say, 'Here we are, Charity! Didn't Washington say we were patriots, too? Just give us a chance to defend our country!'
"Like lightning, now, Charity bent from her saddle, and seizing a stout stick, she wheeled around to the outer side of the hedge that protected the hives like a low wall. Then, with a smart blow, she beat each hive until the bees clouded the air. Realizing from experience that bees always follow the thing that hits them rather than the person who directs it, she threw the stick full force at her pursuers.
"As Charity galloped off at high speed she heard the shouts of fury from the soldiers, who fought madly against the bees. And, of course, the harder they fought, the harder they were stung. If they had been armed with swords the brave bees could not have kept the enemy more magnificently at bay.
"While Charity was riding furiously miles away, down the pike, past the bridge, over the hill, right into Washington's camp, her would-be pursuers lay limply in the dust—their noses swollen like powder horns. When the little maid finally gained admission to Washington's tent, for to none other would she trust her secret, the great general stared at her gray dress torn to ribbons, her kerchief draggled with mud and her gold hair loosened by the wind. But Charity had no time for ceremony."
Charity delivered the message about the the two attacks: the pending British attack and the bee attack. At that point, George Washington praised Charity's bees for saving the country.
Said George: "It is well done, Little Miss Crabtree...Neither you nor your bees shall be forgotten when our country is at peace again. It was the cackling geese that saved Rome, but the bees saved America.”
George Washington never said that, either.
He did, however, go on to rear bees at his Mount Vernon estate.

