A Honey Of A History In Wisconsin

September is National Honey Month. We’re celebrating with this image of the Wisconsin Honey Queen keeping the University of Wisconsin-Madison rowers in line and well-stocked with honey.

Honey bees first came to North America with the European colonists. Beehives, peacocks and pigeons were among the items shipped to the Virginia Company in 1621. Swarms of bees escaped and quickly established themselves.

It is not known when the bees made it to Wisconsin, but the first recorded mention of wild bees was in 1828 from pioneer settler John Fonda. Fonda and a Frenchman named Boiseley were carrying mail from Chicago to Green Bay when they happened on a large oak tree with claw marks from a hungry bear.

They felled the tree to get a taste of the honey themselves. While Boiseley made dinner, Fonda “dipped in” to the honey, perhaps a bit too much.

“I have always been blessed with a good appetite,” Fonda later recalled, “but on that occasion it must have been a little better than usual … That evening I got honey enough for a lifetime.” He ate so much that he never again tasted honey “without a feeling of nausea and disgust.”

Wisconsin’s native peoples were collecting honey long before the first Europeans came. White settlers often found ladders leaning up against bee trees placed there by Native Americans.

Many 19th century farmers kept bees. Honey was valuable for it sweetness and for its ready marketability. It was much cheaper and more easily accessible than sugar.

Many white settlers were accomplished beekeepers and became professional collectors in Wisconsin. The state proved fertile ground for honey bees that seemed to like trees bordering the flowering prairies. By 1900, Wisconsin produced more than 2.6 million pounds of honey annually. One person called Wisconsin “one extensive apiary.”

The Wisconsin Beekeepers Association likely formed in the 1860s (it later changed its name to the Wisconsin Honey Producers Association) to promote and support honey research and production in Wisconsin. The honey queen program, the first in the nation, began in the 1950s.