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L.A. Stories: Community Spotlight

Environment

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Stereograph by Henry T. Payne depicting elevated view of farmhouse and buildings at Lincoln's Bee Ranch in Nicholson Canyon, Los Angeles County. In today’s Los Angeles, backyard beekeeping is all the rage, spurred by an increasing interest in local food and by the City itself, which overturned a late-19th-century ban to legalize urban beekeeping in 2015. But while many associate Los Angeles with agriculture and even viniculture, fewer likely think of the early California industry of “bee ranching” or of the region’s beekeeping past. First imported to California in 1853 by Christopher A. Shelton, introduced to the Southland in 1854 by O. W. Childs, and popularized by John Stewart Harbison, the European Honeybee thrived in Los Angeles’ mild climate, feeding on nectar from bountiful white sage. Hives became common in the Los Angeles Basin, often at sites such as Lincoln’s Bee Ranch in Nicholsons Canyon, as depicted in this photo.
Stereograph depicting an apiary at Sierra Madre Villa hotel, San Gabriel, ca. 1887. Though an 1871 surveyor general’s report deemed LA County the Southland’s greatest honey producer, the industry only truly took off after an 1876 drought killed many cattle herds. Many saw honeybees as a get-rich-quick scheme, and beekeeping became so popular that by 1880, in his pamphlet, “Homes in Los Angeles County,” W. McPherson would claim that there were “fully one hundred thousand colonies in Los Angeles County today.” Though the City of Los Angeles banned beekeeping within city limits in 1879, arguing that bees attacked fruit and destroyed crops (an argument soon to be debunked), in the 1870s and 1880s, beekeeping thrived especially in the Sierra Madre foothills, as seen in this stereograph. And, indeed, as late as 1911, beekeeping was still going strong in Los Angeles (though by that point bees were more typically deployed to gather nectar from orange blossoms than from white sage).