The following article excerpt is appropriate
for Fathers Day.

But first,,,
I would first like to introduce the
author, Edward Bevan M.D. (1770-1860).
One of the greatest authors of honeybee
literature in the 19th century.

The Honey Bee: its Natural History, Physiology,
and Management. By Edward Bevan, M.D. was
first published in London, 1827.
The critics in 1827 write of Bevans book;
"The latter part of the last century and
the commencement of the present, have
given birth to a considerable number of
valuable tracts, elucidating the Natural
History and Physiology of the Honey Bee,
as well as several regular treatises on
its management; but the work before us,
by Dr. Bevan, is the first possessing
any claim to the character of scientific."

The following excerpt is from an article published
in the Huron Reflector, May 09, 1843 Norwalk,
Ohio, titled; `Bevan on the Bee -Second Notice`,
which was intended to introduce Americans to
the American edition of the book; The Honey Bee:
its Natural History, Physiology, re-published
in 1843.

Please find a biography of Bevan,
following this short excerpt titled;
Fathers of the Bee People.

===== Start Excerpt =====

...The drones or males are at once her
majesty's nobles and husbands, dividing
with her the administrative care of the
State, the official trusts, and the parental
functions. They are the office-holders
and politicians; having, in general, little
to do but to buz about royalty, pay their
court, eat the fat and the sweat of the
land, and talk politics. Their number
varies with the strength of the hive,
from fifteen hundred to two thousand.
They seem to be, for nobles and husbands,
rather unwarlike; for they possess
no stings. On the whole, as they
neither fight nor work, but only make
love, they must have rather an easy time
of it. Still, as we do not choose to injure
any body's character, we feel bound
to say that, if they mix not in the ordinary
tasks of the operative Bees, it is the
fault of nature, and not theirs: for she has
furnished them with neither the sort of
trowel to the jaws, with which the workers
manage the wax, nor the baskets to
the legs, in which they collect their fragrant
spoil from the flowers. They labor
not, then, because they have higher
functions to perform, of a far loftier
consequence to the public weal. And their
wise and just fellow-citizens, content
that each order in the State should discharge
its appropriate duty, murmur not,
nor stigmatize them as non-producers,
nor rail nor roar at them as aristocrats;
but recognize their utility in the peculiar
part which has been assigned them
of the public business, and submit with
cheerfulness to their exemption from inferior
tasks, inappropriate as well as impossible
to these general fathers of the Bee people...

===== End Excerpt =====

The Biography of Edward Bevan

Source:
Dictonary of National Biography
by George Smith - 1885
Page 444
http://books.google.com/books?id=KwMJAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA444

Bevan, Edward, M.D. (1770-1860),
physician and an eminent apiarian, was born, in London
on 8 July 1770. Being left fatherless in early infancy,
he was received into the house of his maternal grandfather,
Mr. Powle, of Hereford, and at the age of eight was placed
at the grammar school, Woottonunder- Edge, where he
remained for four years. He was afterwards removed to the
college school at Hereford, and it having been determined
that he should adopt medicine as a profession, he was
apprenticed to a surgeon in that town. He then proceeded to
London, was entered as a student at St. Bartholomew' s
Hospital, and during three sessions of attendance on the
lectures of his instructors Abernethy, Latham, and Austin,
he acquired the honourable appellation of 'the indefatigable. '
His degree of M.D. was obtained from the university of
St. Andrew's in 1818. He commenced practice at Mort-
lake as assistant to Dr. John Clarke. After five years so
spent he settled on his own account first at Stoke-upon-
Trent, and then at Congleton. There he married the second
daughter of Mr. Cartwright, an apothecary, one of the last
of the ' bishops ' of a sect called the primitive Christian
church. After twelve years' residence in Cheshire, his
health not bearing the fatigue of a country business, Bevan
again returned to Mortlake, and practised there for two
years, but with a like result. He thereupon retired to a small
estate at Bridstow, near Ross, in Herefordshire, where he
devoted himself to the development of an apiary which he
found already established on his newly acquired property.
Previous to this he had, in 1822, assisted his friend Mr.
Samuel Parkes in the preparation of the third and revised
edition of the latter's ' Rudiments of Chemistry.' The first
edition of his book on bees was issued in 1827, with the
title, `The Honey- Bee : its Natural History, Physiology,
and Management.' This treatise at once established the
author's reputation as a scientific apiarian, and was read
wherever the bee is regarded as an object of interest. The
second edition, published in 1838, is dedicated to her
Majesty. In it the author has included much new and
valuable matter. A third edition, by W. A. Munn, appeared
in 1870. Bevan also wrote a paper on the ' Honey-Bee
Communities ' in the first volume of the ' Magazine of
Zoology and Botany,' and published a few copies of
' Hints on the History and Management of the Honey-Bee,'
which had formed the substance of two lectures read before
the Hereford Literary Institution in the winter of 1850-51.
He had from 1849 fixed his residence at Hereford, where
he died on 31 Jan. 1860, when within a few months of
completing his ninetieth year As a public man Bevan was
shy and retiring, but was much beloved in the circle of his
private acquaintances. It is recorded as a proof of the
esteem in which he was held, that on the occasion of a
great flood in the Wye, in February 1802, washing away
all the doctor's beehives, a public subscription was raised,
and a new apiary presented to him, of which, as a very
pleasing substitute for what he had playfullv called his
' Virgilian Temple,' the venerable apiarian was justly proud.
Bevan was one of the founders of the Entomological
Society in 1833.

===== End Biography =====

Best Wishes.
Joe Waggle 
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/HistoricalHoneybeeArticles/

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