The final advances in hive design coincided with burgeoning demand for honey from booming populations in Europe and North America, and the near industrialization of bee-keeping in many parts of the world. Bees were brought to New England within two years of the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers. Escapers almost immediately established wild colonies, and these thrived in many parts of the eastern US, moving ahead of the settlers. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The Indians . . .

call them the white man's fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlement of the whites". Ellis notes that "it was said that as the bee advanced, the Indian and the buffalo retired". The honey bee moved west along the Missouri River at almost forty miles per year in the 1800s. It travelled to Utah with the Mormons, where they named their land Deseret after the bee, and the beehive became the motif of the territorial seal "as a symbol of organization, unity and productivity".

Back in Britain, a Dr Edward Bevan had extolled the virtues of the wooden box hive in a book published in 1827; Bevan's thesis was simply that one got more honey and less trouble with box-hives. One of Bevan's greatest admirers was the pastor and teacher Lorenzo Langstroth, a passionately inquisitive bee-keeper in Philadelphia. It was Langstroth who made a very simple observation, in 1851, that revolutionized hive design. Langstroth's hive was constructed with comb-frames slotting onto bars to form a block over which a box cover was dropped, leaving a space between, but the bees "insisted on attaching the frames of comb to the sides of the hive". Langstroth realized that the bees left a corridor between and around the combs that just allowed two bees to pass. Larger gaps were filled in. So gaps between combs and hive-cover had to be the precise "bee-space". It was so simple, yet it had eluded bee-keepers since the dawn of time. Sadly, Langstroth attempted to defend a patent on the new hive and spent many years in hopeless conflict. Nowadays, he is simply remembered as a hero of the bee-keeping world, and the majority of the world's beehives are of his design.

Langstroth hives were the key to the mass-production of honey in California.

The natural nectar sources there were an extraordinary untapped resource, until in the late 1850s John Harbison imported bees from New York by ship to Panama, across the isthmus and then by ship again to San Francisco. By the 1870s, Harbison was the world's biggest honey- producer, and he designed a hive from which two-pound combs could be rapidly removed, packed in pails and shipped. In

1876, ten railroad cars of honeycomb arrived in New York from San Diego, and ten years later California's annual honey production exceeded 1,000 tons.

Other innovations, such as efficient queen- excluder sheets that isolate the brood comb, pre-formed wax bases for the comb, and efficient centrifugation of honey, mean that for the last century large quantities of high-quality honey have been produced cheaply and efficiently, particularly in Mexico and the New World. Today we see too a renaissance in specialist honeys -monoflorals, honeys derived from the nectar of a single plant species, and honeys from distinct floras. These are as highly prized now as they were in Greece more than 2,000 years ago.

The route that man has taken in his relationship with an extraordinary social insect is remarkable enough, but some of the side alleys are even more so.

Hattie Ellis's and Bee Wilson's travelogues enrich our understanding of that journey immeasurably, and a jar of honey will never seem commonplace again.