Queen of Bees Dies at 95

From the New York Times 8/16/07
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/world/europe/16crane.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Posted by Daniel

Eva Crane, English Expert on World’s Bees, Dies at 95


By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: September 16, 2007
Eva Crane, who earned a doctorate in nuclear physics and then abandoned the field to devote herself to expanding and spreading knowledge about bees as a researcher, historian, archivist, editor and author, died on Sept. 6 in Slough, England.

She was 95, 57 years shy of the reputed life span of the 17th-century English farmer Thomas Parr who, she suggested in one of her books, owed his longevity to eating honey that she said he produced as a beekeeper. The International Bee Research Association, which she founded in 1949, announced her death.

For more than a half-century Dr. Crane worked in more than 60 countries to learn more and more about honeybees, sometimes traveling by dugout canoe or dog sled to document the human use of bees from prehistoric times to the present. She found that ancient Babylonians used honey to preserve corpses, that bees were effectively used as military weapons by the Viet Cong, and that beekeepers in a remote corner of Pakistan use the same kind of hives found in excavations of ancient Greece.

The usefulness of her findings was apparent in 2001 when an official of the United States Department of Agriculture in Louisiana read about Russian bees in one of her books. They had developed a resistance to mites, which had been devastating local bees, The Sunday Advocate of Baton Rouge reported. The agency imported some Russian bees, and the Louisiana bees were soon mite-resistant.

Dr. Crane wrote some of the most important books on bees and apiculture, including “The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting” (1999). In a review in The Guardian, the author Paul Theroux, himself a beekeeper, called the book a masterwork “for its enormous scope and exhaustiveness, for being an up-to-date treasure house of apiaristic facts.”

In an obituary published Friday, the British newspaper The Independent said Dr. Crane published more than 180 papers, articles and books. It noted that she wrote most of them when she was in her 70s and 80s, after stepping down in 1984 from the day-to-day running of the association.

The Times of London in 1999 called her the “queen bee among bee experts.”

Ethel Eva Widdowson was born in London on June 12, 1912. Her older sister, Elsie Widdowson, who never retired either, helped revolutionize the field of nutrition, showing similar energy chasing seals on ice floes to study their eating habits.

Elsie died in 2000. The bee association did not list any survivors for Dr. Crane.

Both sisters attended Sydenham, a girls’ school known for having dedicated women as teachers, The Independent reported in 2000. Eva moved on to King’s College London, where she was one of only two women then studying mathematics at the University of London, of which King’s College is a part. She completed her degree in two years, then earned master’s degree in quantum mechanics and a doctorate in nuclear physics.

She took a post lecturing on nuclear physics at Sheffield University in 1941. The next year she married James Crane, a stockbroker serving in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He died in 1978.

One of their wedding presents was a box containing a swarm of bees, which the giver thought might be useful in supplementing their meager wartime sugar ration. Dr. Crane soon became fascinated with the hive, subscribed to a bee magazine and joined a local bee club, The Independent reported.

She became secretary of the research committee of the British Beekeepers Association. In 1949, she founded the Bee Research Association, which adopted its present name in 1976. For 20 years beginning in 1962, Dr. Crane edited the association’s Journal of Apicultural Research, as well as editing Bee World from 1949 until 1984. (The two merged in 2006.)

The meticulousness of Dr. Crane’s research showed in her examination of ancient rock images involving bees and honey. She studied 152 sites in 17 countries from a register of rock art she established herself for her book “The Rock Art of Honey Hunters” (2001).

Her goal was to show how ancient ways of cultivating bees persisted in still-used, but disappearing, methods. She called her generation the last that would be “able to see the world’s rich variety of traditional beekeeping.”

Dr. Crane also offered advice on how to use honey as a cosmetic. She advised dissolving two tablespoons of honey in two tablespoons of water, then adding six more tablespoons of water to concoct an excellent facial cleanser.