Charles Butler (beekeeper)

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Charles Butler (1560 - 1647), sometimes called the Father of English Beekeeping^[1], was a logician, grammarist, author, minister (Vicar of Wooton, near Basingstoke, England), and an influential beekeeper. He observed that bees produce wax combs from scales of wax produced in their own bodies; and he was among the first to asert that drones are male and the queen female, though he believed worker bees lay eggs.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Beekeeping 3 Writings 4 References

[edit] Biography

Butler was born into a poor family but was admitted to Oxford as a working student with scholastic sholarships. He remained at Oxford ten years, probably teaching, and graduating with his Master of Arts in 1587. In 1593, Rev. Butler became Rector of Nately Scures in Hampshire, and later Master at the Holy Ghost School, Basingstoke. He resigned to accept a pastorage at Wootton St Lawrence in 1600 and served that rural post to his death in 1647.

[edit] Beekeeping

Butler was engaged in beekeeping in rural Hampshire and made the first recorded observations about the generation of beeswax, which was previously thought to be gathered by honeybees from plant materials. He was not the first to described the largest honeybee as a queen, rather than king (see Swammerdam) but he popularized the notion with his classic book The Feminine Monarchie, 1609. Butler misinterpretted the queen's function and thought that the workers lay eggs.

[edit] Writings

The Feminine Monarchie, 1609, is the first full-length English-language book about beekeeping. It remained a valid and practical guide for beekeepers for two hundred fifty years, until Langstroth and others developed and promoted moveable comb hives. Butler revised The Feminine Monarchie in 1623 and 1634. It was translated into Latin in 1678 and 1682, then from Latin back to English again in 1704. The book gives an excellent account of skep beekeeping, including methods of predicting - from tone pitch of the buzzing bees - when swarming will occur. Butler even transliterated the tones and included them on a musical score in the book.

Other books by Charles Butler included an English grammar (1633) with proposals to improve spelling to a phonetic alphabet. The 1634 edition of his beekeeping classic was written and published in his new orthology. Butler also published a book on logic (1597) and a book on music theory, The principles of musik (1636).

[edit] References