Apropos of nothing really, but a great paragraph

American honey production had never been on a large scale until the late nineteenth century. Then southern California led in making it a comparatively large-scale activity. Natural it was that the most individualistic branch of so self-reliant an occupation as agriculture would develop without benefit of commercial advertising, and on territory not usually owned by private concerns, but government land. The health seeking rancher in southern California was to be a frontiersman, and beekeeping was the most rugged and probably the earliest rampart of this farm frontier. The apiarist went where the land was wild and empty. Virtually by necessity he sought out the hillsides and hidden, protected valleys where thrived numerous wild plants ideally suited to honey production. Here, too, free from coastal fogs thrived the consumptive, and a little farther inland in the dry regions or peaceful uplands bees and asthmatics did their best. Health and wealth were truly tied together for these early beekeepers, for the fruit farmer and stockman had not yet destroyed the natural vegetation which was the beeman's destined profit. When these later and more prosaic men arrived, honey declined in price and production production and the apiarist disappeared as a significant builder of California. — Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Nov., 1951), pp. 347-363

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