25/07/2025
Even before beekeeping was a regularly established practice in Michigan, people craved the sweet taste of honey. To acquire honey—and other bee-related goods like beeswax—settlers and Native Americas in the nineteenth century engaged in bee hunting, an activity that involved tracking wild bees to their hives in hollow trees. The practice captured the imagination of the early American public, inspiring several fictional tales about those intrepid pursuers of honey. Some of these fictional stories include the 1857 novel “Puddleford and Its People” by Michigander Henry H. Riley, and “Oak Openings” by James Fenimore Cooper. Have you read either of these novels, or any others about bee hunting?
When European colonists arrived in North America, they realized quickly that the bees native to the New World—such as the Eastern bumblebee, carpenter bees, and mining bees—do not produce neat wax honeycombs filled with honey. As a result, European honeybees were imported and managed to ensure the continued production of honey and beeswax. Occasionally, the bees would abandon their wooden manmade hives and migrate into unsettled forests, where there would establish new honeycomb-based hives in hollow trees. These trees became known as bee trees, and the Native Americans and European colonists who searched for the bee trees became known as bee hunters. There is much historical evidence of bee hunting in Michigan during these times, including the “Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections” and the book “The Bark Covered House” by William Nowlin, which describes bee hunting near Dearborn, Michigan, in great detail. Nowlin describes building a bee-hunting stand, on which a piece of honeycomb was placed as bait to attract bees, and then following the honey-laden bees back to their hive and placing their initials on the tree, so other bee hunters would know that hive had been claimed. This practice was common until the mid-1850s, when beekeeping became the preferred method of obtaining honey and beeswax.
Learn more about the bee hunting process and about the individual Michiganders who participated in it in the full article “Before Beekeeping: Nineteenth Century Bee Hunters” in the July/August issue of Michigan History magazine! Learn more at https://hsmichigan.org/read/michigan-history
