UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE
MADISON, WISCONSIN
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY                             Tafuary 13, 1937
Professor Aldo Leopold,
Old Economic Entomology Bldg.
Dear Professor Leopold:
Your letter of January 9 has been received,
and I will arrange to do something about a joint seminar meeting.
I think Dr. Fluke will be willing to come. Certainly there is no
reason for not inviting Dr. Marshall.
With regard to Cooper's "Oak Openings", I
have read the book, which is quite interesting, particularly that
part dealing with the tracking of the bees. There are two consid-
erations in trying to analyze the matter of whether or not bees
were present in the woods as early as 1812. Cooper mentions that
the French settled on the Detroit River at a very early date, and
if they happen to have carried bees in, it would have been possible
for the woods to be fairly well populated with bees by 1812. On
the other hand, it may be that Cooper developed this idea on what
he found existing in 1848, at the time when the story was written.
By that time bees were well established throughout Michigan, Wis-
consih, and, ofcourse, such states as Indiana, Illinois and Iowa.
Unless bees were brought in by the French at a much earlier date
than 1812, I think we can positively say there were no bees in the
woods of Michigan in 1812.
According to Cooper, he made a very rapid
journey from the east to the west, and apparently developed the
idea for a story in a very short time, as it all occurred within
a few weeks, About 1848, considerable attention was being paid to
tracking bees by beekeepers, and T suspect that Cooper took the
liberty of adding that part of the story without much investigation
as to the earlier facts.
One statement in his book leads me to auestion
whether he actually witnessed the operation of tracking the bees. He
writes about an elm that contained a colony of bees 70 feet above
ground. I do not question but that elms may grow to be 70 feet high,
but I do question that any elm would have a sufficiently large cavity
in a limb 70 feet above ground to contain a colony of bees. As a
rule, I think limbs that high would be perfectly sound or completely
dead, but not hollow. A limb would have to be at least 8 to 10 inches
in diameter to permit a hollow space large enough for the colony. That
would mean that the tree would have to be very tall, indeed, to provide