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Eva Crane: Queen of the Bees
| Article
# : |
10833 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
2,833 Words |
| Author
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Linda Joyce Forristal
Linda Joyce Forristal, Life editor for The World & I, is a
member of Les Dames d'Escoffier and is on the board of the
Weston A. Price Foundation. |
At a country home in Gerrards Cross, just the right distance from London, the bees are busily flying back and forth in the backyard, unaware of the specialness of their keeper. Singlemindedly they keep to the job God gave them: collecting nectar and spinning it into golden honey.
Eva Crane, a stately woman with an educated and a distinctively aristocratic British accent, is inside the house with Lucy, her companion dog. With the same single mindedness as her bees, she is engrossed in accumulating and processing hordes of information about bees and the sweetness they produce.
Anyone even remotely interested in apiculture (the science of beekeeping) or honey is bound to come across Crane's name. Whether the interest is professional, such as that of a student of entomology, or casual, such as that of a backyard beekeeper, it is only a matter of time before one must refer to one of the numerous books Crane has written about bees and honey.
Judging from her many books, it would be easy to assume that Crane is an entomologist. But that is far from the truth. Her scientific career actually began as a physicist in wartime England.
As Eva Widdowson, she was the only woman studying physics at Kings College in London. After receiving a master's in quantum mechanics and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of London, she went on to teach physics at various universities. Reminiscing of that time she says with marked ease, "Oh, yes, I was the only woman studying physics at the time, but it never bothered me. I have often been the only woman . . . but I have never been discriminated against."
Crane got the idea of keeping bees in the winter before her marriage to James Alfred Crane, a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officer. "Because of the war we were all short of sugar," reflects Crane, "and I received a swarm of bees as a wedding present." Honey was a welcome addition to the larder.
Encouraged by her small successes as a beekeeper, she started attending the local beekeeping association meetings in Sheffield. But because she was a trained scientist accustomed to following logical inquiry, she visited the university library to look up abstract journals to find articles about bees and honey. To her dismay and chagrin, no scientific bee journal existed. It was impossible to locate past scientific work done on honeybees.
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