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Happy Hives, Lake Wales, FL (2026)

05/02/2025

America 🇺🇸 is in a state crisis. Food shortages and mass unemployment. Because of what?
Disease?
War?
Natural Disaster?
NO, FROM TRUMP AND AMETUER (BUT RICH) CABINET....

05/09/2024

05/08/2024

I

05/06/2024

'Beekeeping in Appalachia'
circa. 1920 ~ Bee Gums at the Henry Lay Place,
Owsley County, Kentucky.
Image: Courtesy of: The Photography of Coley Ogg

Pictured here, a row of 6 bee gums and a box hive. Note the two V notches at the bottom used for bee entrance and horizontal wooden sticks running thru the hives in the center for comb support. Typically, honey comb was harvested from the top down to the comb support sticks, and the bottom half left for the bees.

In the quote below, Coley Ogg, the photographer of the bee gums at the Henry Lay place talks about his first hive of bees. The quote came from an essay by Dr. James Watt Raine, Berea College English dept head.. Raine died in 1939.. but this was written long before.. not sure of the date.. but i think after 1914..before 1925.. it was published on the occasion of Ogg's passing... Dec 21, 1940 in the Berea Citizen. -kathi, Coley Ogg's Great Granddaughter

“I got my first hive of bees when I was ten years old. That was on a Sunday, too. I was running through the orchard and ducked under an apple tree with low-hanging branches. My head struck something soft; it was a soft swarm of bees hanging in a great cluster to the branch. I stopped to see what it was and then ran for a bee gum. The only kind we had then was 30-inch cuts of a hollow gum tree with the inside carefully burnt out period. I set it on a flat stone, then cut off the limb the bees were hanging on and brushed them off in front of the bee gum, and they all went in. I did it all myself period. So, Pa said, ‘Well, son, that is your hive of bees.’ I watched the bees till I knew everything they did, bring in honey, was, bee-bread, jelly, build comb, fill it, cap the cells, buzz their wings to ventilate the hive, fight strange bees that come to rob them, and as far as I could guess why they did it.” -Coley Ogg (source: kathi, Coley Ogg's Great Granddaughter)

Image:
Bee Gums at the Henry Lay place, Owsley county, Kentucky.
Courtesy of: The Photography of Coley Ogg

Special thanks to Coley Ogg's Great-granddaughter, kathi for being so generous, sharing the Coley Ogg photos.