Great bee ladies

Claire Chavasse

The Irish beekeeping community lost one of their leading beekeepers with the death of Claire Chavasse in August 2007. Many of those who participated in the Apimondia Congress in Dublin in 2005 will remember Claire, who ensured that the Workshops on Beekeeping for Rural Development were so smoothly run, enabling experts to give perfect demonstrations of candle making, carpentry and many other practical aspects of beekeeping. Claire Chavasse was both expert practitioner and expert lecturer in beekeeping, always providing meticulously prepared, scientifically correct information, yet delivered in a style that encouraged learning. Claire would always question rather than take statements and traditional teachings as absolute, and had no time for poor standards.

Claire was laid to rest in the graveyard where the tree had grown that provided the timber for the top-bar hives made at the Workshops mentioned above. Claire was a marvellous lady: a kind and generous friend and mentor to many people.

Eva Crane

Eva Crane died in early September 2007: the following week, at the opening ceremony of the Apimondia Congress in Melbourne, participants observed a minute in silent remembrance of this lady. Amongst the audience of apicultural scientists and beekeepers there would have been few who had not at some stage consulted her work, now published in many languages. Eva Crane was an erudite lady who made the field of documentation of apicultural science her own. Well into her eighties, Eva Crane continued to work, writing major texts such as The world history of beekeeping and honey hunting, and gaining respect beyond the ‘bee world’ as her studies took her into the fields of anthropology and archaeology. The great feature of Eva Crane's work is that every statement, every reference, can be relied upon to be scientifically correct. Her aim was to procure information about bees, to present it in a rigorously scientific way, and so that people could subsequently gain access. Organising information took the form of creating a library, databases, identifying and cataloguing museum items, and any other route necessary for collating information such that it became accessible.

I feel fortunate to have known Eva Crane — without her and the existence of the International Bee Research Association (IBRA), our own organisation, Bees for Development, would not exist today.

Nicola Bradbear