A college bee-gins: apiculture at the OAC
It is widely known that bees can build hives and make honey. It is not so well known that bees can help to found colleges. Yet, that was the case for the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC), now part of the University of Guelph.
The OAC was the first school in Canada to have an entire building dedicated to the study of bees and beekeeping, a science known as apiculture. The Apiculture Building of the OAC is shown in the postcard. A modest building at 64 by 47 feet and two storeys in height, it had a stone basement specially insulated for keeping bees over winter. Its upper storeys featured laboratories and classrooms for the apiculture program. The rounded heads over the first-storey windows may have been designed to evoke beehives.
Despite its modesty, it was a step up from the basement of the Macdonald Institute, where the Apiculture Department was housed previously and spoke to the importance attached to apiculture by the college.
The association between beekeeping and the college predates the institution itself. The notion that Canada should have an agricultural college had been mooted even before Confederation. The idea finally took off in 1868 when the government of the newlyminted Province of Ontario commissioned a report on the matter. The task of writing the report was given to Rev. William F. Clarke, then pastor of the Congregational Church of Guelph.
Rev. Clarke was well qualified for the job. Born in Coventry, England, in 1824 and the son of a Congregationalist minister, he immigrated to Canada in 1837 and attended the Congregational College of British North America in Toronto. He became pastor of the Guelph church from 1860 to 1872 and later retired to the Royal City.
He was much involved in regional agriculture, having founded or edited several agricultural journals such as the Canada Farmer, Ontario Farmer and the Rural Canadian. He was particularly interested in beekeeping, and edited the American Bee Journal, founded the Guelph Central Bee-Keepers’ Association and published the monograph, “A bird’s-eye view of beekeeping.”
In his research, Clarke visited agricultural colleges in Massachusetts and Michigan. In 1870, he recommended that Ontario establish a similar institution, adjusted to British traditions. After a false start in Mimico, the Ontario government established the College on Frederick Stone’s farm just south of Guelph.
Rev. Clarke was appointed rector of the college while Henry McCandless was brought in from Cornell University to be president. Classes began in May 1874. McCandless quickly proved inadequate to the task and a salacious scandal erupted, which caused Rev. Clarke to resign in protest. An investigation cleared the good reverend of accusations such as selling rhubarb roots to the college at inflated prices. McCandless departed and affairs at the college were sorted out.
Despite this brouhaha, Rev. Clarke gave lectures in apiculture at the college until 1895. Alumni later described these lectures cryptically as containing “many humorous incidents.” Perhaps the good reverend demonstrated the notorious “beard of bees” to his nervous, beekeeping novices. In any event, the lectures were memorable.
Subsequent professors of apiculture, notably Morely Pettit, built up the department until it merited its own edifice. It stood on what is now the northeast corner of the University Centre, facing onto Branion Plaza. Indeed, it was demolished in 1972 in order to make way for the new building, part of the modernization of the campus following the formation of the University of Guelph. Of all the older buildings demolished for this purpose, university president William Winegard lamented only the loss of the Apiculture Building.
“It was a functional building serving a purpose,” he said.
That point notwithstanding, it stood in the way of progress and so was removed.
Although the University of Guelph no longer has an Apiculture Building, the science lives on in the Honey Bee Research Centre, to be found amid the sylvan surroundings of the campus Arboretum.