This note is not about beekeeping but someone might find the information interesting. I have been working on a presentation of a particular expedition to the Wind River Mountains and the Mountain Man Rendezvous of 1837. Beaver fur was traded during the rendezvous and was a commodity something like Bitcoin today. In my search I came across the image below titled "Aligning the Bees." The trappers and outfitters would capture bees and then release them one at a time following them to their hive. The artist was Alfred Jacob Miller, a Baltimore artist hired by Sir Willian Drummond Stewart (The heir of the English Steward Family) to accompany the expedition and record the images. Honey and beeswax were valuable commodities in America and especially on the frontier. I haven't been able to identify the person chasing the bees to their hive, but the image in white standing by the fire is Stewart. Jim Bridger, and Sacajawea ( One of the guides on the Lewis & Clark Expedition) was on this journey as well as her son Charbonneau who was born on the 1804 Expedition. The words below are from "The History of Bees in America." *Edwin James, in his account of S.H. Long’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1819-1820, describes finding a swarm of bees in a cottonwood tree along the Arkansas River. He writes: “These useful insects reminded us of the comforts and luxuries of life among men, and at the same time gave us the assurance that we were drawing near the abodes of civilization. Bees, it is said by the hunters and the Indians, are rarely if ever seen more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles in advance of the white settlements” (160). Josiah Gregg, also travelling in Arkansas between 1831 and 1839, reports that the honey bee had advanced “to the distance of two or three hundred miles west of the Missouri and Arkansas frontier” * [image: Harvey-4.jpg]
