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Aug 23

Then & Now: One of the world’s most successful beekeepers was a Tompkins County resident – Ithaca Journal

Diets that Work Comments Off on Then & Now: One of the world’s most successful beekeepers was a Tompkins County resident – Ithaca Journal

Donna Eschenbrenner, Special to the Ithaca Journal Published 8:00 p.m. ET Aug. 21, 2020

When Ithaca resident Freida Diemond turned 100 years old during the coronavirus pandemic, the staff at Oak Hill Manor Nursing Home arranged a party for her. Ithaca Journal

Humans have been beekeepers for a long time. A rock painting in Spain dating from 7000 BCE shows a man gathering honey from a beehive. Ancient Egyptians kept bees, and the Romans had large apiaries for honey production.

There are about 20,000 different species of bees, but one kind that is commonly known to people is the honey bee, or apismellifera. European settlers of North America brought this bee with them in the early 1600's. The environment was well suited for this prolific little social bee, and it spread widely across the United States.

By the mid-19th century, beekeepers here and abroad were working to develop hives that would enable them to better harvest honey, but they didnt succeed until 1851, when the Rev. L.L. Langstroth, a minister and part-time beekeeper, developed a new kind of commercial hive that allowed beekeepers to remove combs of honey safely and securely. According to one scholar, Langstroths innovation enabled the growth of beekeeping from a gardening or small farming sideline to a full-scale commercial enterprise.

ProfessorRoger Morse, of Cornell University, has written that there are around 300,000 beekeepers in the United States a few of them commercial beekeepers with hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of bee colonies, but many are merely hobbyists producing honey as a sideline.

In the early years of the 20th century, one of the most successful beekeepers in the world, W.L. Coggshall, lived here in Tompkins County.

W.L. (LaMar) Coggshall is pictured here with his two sons in his beeyard.(Photo: Provided)

John Coggshall, of England, emigrated to Newport, Rhode Island, in the early 17th century. His family became farmers in Connecticut, but his great grandson David Hayt Coggshall moved to Groton in 1820.

Davids son, another David, was a farmer and apiarist, or beekeeper, in Groton, where he lived until his death in 1889. The next generation produced two beekeepers of note: yet a third David Coggshalland, more importantly, William LaMar Coggshall, who was to become one of the most prolific and successful beekeepers in the world in his time.

Born in 1852, LaMar, as he was known to colleagues, was also a farmer like his ancestors. His beekeeping interests were supplemental to that, but he nonetheless managed to grow and expand his bee colonies throughout the years. He was one of the first beekeepers in New York to expand his bee colonies to what are known as out-yards. These are locations away from his home farm, and he developed several, some in Lansing, Mecklenburg, Enfield, Danbyand Ellis Hollow.

Eventually, he expanded his business to Arizona, Coloradoand even Cuba. At the height of his success, he had more than 3,000 colonies. His most productive hives were here in central New York, and he attributed that to the generous buckwheat crop of the Finger Lakes area, from which bees can produce excellent honey.

He trained his farmhands (usually teenage boys) to work quickly and forcefully as they extracted honey from the combs, ignoring, as much as possible, the stings of some angry bees. On a good afternoons work, they could extract more than 1,000 pounds of honey in just over an hour. The records of the Empire State Honey Producers Association reflect this success: In 1904 Tompkins County was the record honey producing county in the state; the county produced 236,000 pounds of honey. W.L. Coggshall, the worlds largest honey producer, had over 20 apiaries in the county.

LaMar Coggshall died in 1926. His sons, and later his grandson William L. Coggshall, also kept up the familys beekeeping interests throughout the middle of the 20th century. They were instrumental in starting the Finger Lakes Honey Producers Cooperative in Groton.The first manager of the cooperative was Elton J. Dyce, of Ontario, Canada, who later became professor of apiculture at Cornell. The Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies is named for him.

Honeybees are threatened now by a parasitic mite, Varroadestructor, as well as overuse of pesticides, and whole colonies are dying off in alarming numbers. American beekeepers are reporting that more than half of their colonies are infested with the mite, and this could have a direct impact on our food supplies.Many staples of American diets ,including almonds, apples and pears, are pollinated by bees.

Special thanks are due to Peter Borst, of Cornell, for his generous gift of invaluable information on all things related to beekeeping.

Donna Eschenbrenner is the archivist at The History Center in Tompkins County.

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Then & Now: One of the world's most successful beekeepers was a Tompkins County resident - Ithaca Journal

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