[Pollinator] NY Times Article on Eva Crane

[Ladadams at aol.com]

Submitted by Nan Vance


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.





Laurie Davies Adams
Executive Director
Coeovlution Institute
425 Washington Street, 5th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94111
415 362 1137 (p)
415 362 3070 (f)
LDA at coevolution.org
www.coevolution.org
www.nappc.org
www.pollinator.org


Join the Pollinator Partnership working to protect agriculture and ecosystems 
- visit www.pollinator.org



**************************************
 See what's new at http://www.aol.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/pollinator/attachments/20070919/c782f8c6/attachment.html