I just noticed that Forum Auction is selling a 1st Edition of the Rev. Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie or a treatise concerning bees, and the due ordering of them. This book, which was published in 1609, was the first full-length English language book on beekeeping and remained a valid guide for beekeepers until the development of moveable frame hives 250 years later. Its widely regarded as “the greatest early British bee book” (British Bee Books). So just what is it that makes this book so important?
The Rev.Charles Butler (1571 – 1647) was born into a poor family in Buckinghamshire, but his intelligence was spotted by a member of the well to do Pigott family and so Butler was able to attend the local grammar school. He went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a boy chorister, later graduating and taking holy orders. In 1593 he was made Rector of Nately Scures in Hampshire and several years later became Master of Holy Ghost School, Basingstoke as well. In 1600 he resigned these posts to take up the position of Vicar of Wooton St Lawrence near Basingstoke, a position he would hold until his death in 1647.
The church at Wooton St Lawrence was not large and came with just a modest living and Butler began keeping bees to augment the living. On the birth of of his daughter Elizabeth he set aside a number of hives to provide her with a dowry. At the time of her marriage these hives had produced £400, a large sum of money in the early 17th century.1 This suggests he was a more than competent beekeeper but he was also perhaps the first beekeeper to approach the study of beekeeping with a scientific mindset. Its the observations of bees that he made that make this book so important.
Until the 17th century it was widely thought, as Aristotle had stated, that a beehive was governed by a ‘King bee’. Butler was not actually the first to observe that the hive was infact presided over by a queen (Luis Mendez de Torres made this observation in 1586) but his book brought the fact into public consciousness. He also correctly understood that drone’s were male, that the bees produced beeswax rather than collecting it from plants. He understood that each hive has its own distinct scent that enables the colony to identify intruders and so protect itself from being robbed. The book remains one of the best accounts we have of skep beekeeping but contained information on bee gardens, hive-making materials, swarm catching, enemies of bees, feeding bees, and the benefits of bees to fruit. Butler also suggested that swarming could be predicted by the pitch of the buzzing within the hive.
Butler revised The Feminine Monarchie in 1623 and 1634. The 1623 edition is notable because it includes the ‘Bees’ Madrigal’ on a musical score, this being Butlers transliteration of the sounds of the queen ‘piping’ when a colony swarms. Forum Auctions sold a 1623 edition of the book (which may be the better edition) in 2021 for £4800 (+ 26% commission). The 1st Edition was last seen at Auction in 1933 and while the copy now offered for sale is in poor condition with just the remains of its covers present and damage (worming, damp staining) to some pages and a few others trimmed in such a way that a few letters are lost from the edge of the page, the auction estimate is still £2000 to £3000. It will be interesting to see how well it sells.
Update: This sold for £7500 + commission
