Click Here if you listened. We’d love to know what you think. There is even a spot for feedback! Read along below!
By: Stephen Bishop
In celebration of our 250th anniversary as a nation, let us remember Thomas Jefferson — founding father and author of the Declaration of Independence. By writing such a highfalutin document, however, Jefferson nearly outdid himself and overshadowed his greatest accomplishment, achieving the distinction as Virginia’s worst farmer. Among neighboring farmers, the joke was that Jefferson was such a bad farmer he couldn’t even grow oats and merely fed his horses philosophy. Jefferson’s friend Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, “He is a great agriculturalist and horticulturalist in theory, but practically, I imagine, he knows little of any cultivation, but that of flowers, of which he is extremely fond.”
Despite being a pitiful farmer, Thomas Jeffereson was a first-rate dreamer who cultivated an agrarian ideal through his writing that has since captured the minds of many others. For some of us, making a living beekeeping is perhaps the quintessential American dream. Indeed, many a person has been fascinated, if not obsessed, by bees, and many a man has had a mid-life crisis and spent their life savings on bee boxes, but few have ever been quite as successful as Amos Ives Root, the founder of this very magazine.
Amos started out as a jeweler until, as luck would have it, a swarm passed over his head and settled on a tree in 1865, after which Amos became a man obsessed by bees. He soon found in a bookstore The Hive and the Honeybee, Lorenzo’s Langstroth’s recently published book, and he later said of the book, “What a gold-mine that book seemed to me as I looked it over on my journey home! Never was romance so enticing — no, not even Robinson Crusoe.” Yep, he was a man obsessed.
Meanwhile, at about the same time, a Frenchman was tired of his countrymen revolting repeatedly and hindering his business ventures, so he decided at the age of 46 to move to America and try his hand at the American dream. Turns out, he too was a terrible farmer, but he was a much better beekeeper and also a man obsessed by bees. His name was Charles Dadant. Soon he would become a frequent contributor to the American Bee Journal, and later his family would go on to buy the publication outright.
When, in 1873, Root published his first issue of Gleanings in Bee Culture, he states in the first paragraph, “Fellow Novices: We must admit to a feeling of not being quite as much at home here, just yet, as in the old American Bee Journal, but we trust we shall all, in time, feel all the liberty here that we have there enjoyed.” Over the years, Root and Dadant’s businesses would sometimes partner and sometimes compete, and the two men would often engage each other in friendly professional debates about beekeeping in the editorial pages of their respective magazines, often addressing each other as “Friend Root” or “Friend Dadant.”
Despite differences in beekeeping philosophies, both men pursued their passion, and in so doing they built the two biggest and most successful bee supply companies in the United States at the time. Bee Culture and the American Bee Journal are still going strong and are still published by A.I. Root Company and Dadant and Sons respectively.
And so, while Jefferson may have failed spectacularly at farming, Root and Dadant managed to fulfill the very ideal he wrote into existence. They built lives of liberty and happiness from little more than stubbornness, a little friendly competition, and the enduring American habit of dreaming beyond reason. Long live the American Dream!
