Langstroth Cottage - Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth

Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth

Lorenzo Langstroth grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and was the second oldest of eight children. He also attended Yale College where he found religion, and eventually entered the Yale Divinity School to study for the ministry, where he eventually became Oxford’s Presbyterian Minister. After finding his love of bees, he married Anne Tucker and they started a family. Unfortunately, Langstroth developed a nervous disorder, which eventually led him to sell his bees. Upon returning to Massachusetts to work on his health, Langstroth started writing his manual Langstroth on the Honeybee. Langstroth was said to have been seasonally depressed and would go months without speaking. His depression only worsened after his wife died which then he would only show love and emotion towards his honeybees. In the last years of his life, he lived with his daughter and her family in Dayton, Ohio. While attending church, Langstroth started preaching and as he said “I wish to talk to you this morning about the love of God,” he collapsed and died; Langstroth is buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio with his gravestone marking “The Father of American Beekeeping”.

University Archives, Oxford..]]

Sonnet - To Langstroth (Inventor of the Moveable Frame which permitted Beekeepers to rob the hive without sulphuring the bees to death) Since hives in Greece were set on slopes of thyme To win sweet gold for Heroes’ cups of mead The gods themselves have shown no kinder deed To Insect or to Man than that of thine! Certain it is no honeyed words of mine Can do thee justice, Langstroth, so I plead For Jove’s Hymettus Bees of sacred breed To weave in Attic chorus round thy shrine. Next, Saturn’s son, dispatch their golden kin Whom Virgil lauded in Georgic lay! Wontan and Thor send Germans black as sin! Sweet Aphrodite Bees from Paphos Bay! And Ra from perfumed bean-fields by Nile’s brim Those scarab Bees that nest in pipes of clay -From Poems of a Bee-Keeper, Everard Stokes.