Bee World – The First Hundred Years

Page 34 • VOL 96 • June 2019 • Bee World © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Bee World – The First Hundred Years

During his time as Editor, Abushâdy did not author many articles himself, but Bee World later published some articles that elucidate his life, including an obituary on his father (Abushâdy, 1925) and an article written by his granddaughter Joy, who is an artist living in New York (Garnett, 2014). His granddaughter also kindly assisted us with this article by providing pictures from her archive ( Figure 2). Harker (1938) summed up Abushâdy as "poet-bee-master-humanist. " In his 1989 guest editorial to commemorate the 70th birthday of Bee World, Karl Showler described Abushâdy as, "an international character, son of a leading Waftist politician, lawyer and newspaper proprietor, who commenced his literary life with contributions to his father's paper ' AI Zahir' in 1905 and with a first book of poetry 'Katra min Yarah' (a drop from a pen) in 1908. After an unhappy love affair he came to London to complete his medical studies and gathered round him a band of enthusiastic beekeepers who, as the War ended, established the ' Apis Club' and The Bee World" (Abushâdy & Showler, 1989).
Abushâdy and his wife Annie (born Bamford) were passionate beekeepers and he seemed to have been innovative in making hive improvements, as demonstrated by constructional drawings in the first issue of Bee World (Abushâdy, 1919). He took out four patents related to beekeeping, the most well-known being a metal comb foundation (GB Patent No. 150502-A; and an incubator for the artificial hatching of queen bees (GB Patent No. 138448-A;. When the couple moved to Egypt, they introduced the Langstroth hive and other beekeeping equipment and procedures to the country. In Egypt, Abushâdy founded, in 1930, the bilingual bee journal "The Bee Kingdom -a monthly review of modern bee culture" for the "Bee Kingdom League" -the Egyptian counterpart to the Apis Club. In his home country, he is even more famous for the foundation of the influential journal for experimental Arabic poetry "Apollo" in 1932 (Ostle, 2000). He continued to edit The Bee World from his base in Egypt. It gently drifted along supported by the enthusiasm of the Apis Club members and in particular one or two affluent beekeepers. The journal now had an established pattern including serious original articles, reports from supporting associations and features which were to remain for DOI: 10.1080/0005772X.2019.1591682 a Figure 1. Different appearances of Bee World in the past starting with the first issue 1919 top left. Volume 33 (1952), Vol. 49 (1968), Vol. 68 (1987), Vol. 73 (1992), Vol. 82 (2001), Vol. 85 (2004), Vol. 87 (2010. many years such as book reviews in "Our Bookshelf " and "The Press Mirror" which reflected items of interest drawn from the beekeeping press worldwide. Abushâdy died on 12 April 1955 in Washington D.C. suffering a stroke. In Alexandria, a street near his home is named after him and an Egyptian postage stamp issued in 1992 honors his memory ( Figure 2).

Captain James Bernard Morgan
In March 1926, one of the prime benefactors of the journal, Richard Whyte, died before he could fulfill his intention of setting up a fund to give the club and the journal some financial security (Tinsley, 1925, but published April 1926. The financial struggles of The Bee World in the first 6 years of its existence are chronicled in the journal by Whyte (1925).
The year 1926 also saw some other important changes. Production was moved to London and, in August, Captain James Bernard Morgan (Table 1), became the new Editor. He had been the secretary of the Apis Club since 1923 and had worked tirelessly to put it on a firmer financial footing. He now set about applying his skills to The Bee World and his first task, and one that was to be high on the priority of successive Editors, was to stabilize the journal's position as well as drawing in a wider readership. He set about doing this by reducing the typographic clutter and sharpening the print style which up to then still had a turn of the century feel. As an Editor he retained sub-headings using a modern script as his choice although it seems that the printers were rather wayward and often changed the print font on a whim so that any form of house style was ignored except for the editorial which retained a gentle form of Gothic script.
The mid-twenties were something of an in-between time for bee science and apicultural development. The huge innovational steps that ushered in modern beekeeping techniques in the 1850s and 60s were well established and the problems and scientific advances of the mid twentieth century were still in the undreamt of future. Things were slow moving and so there was plenty of time for beekeepers to indulge in their favorite pursuit of heated arguments often over unprovable facts.
Morgan was keen to foster the international aspect of bees and beekeeping. In 1927 the first, truly international conference of the Apis Club was held under the presidency of the American Dr. E. F. Phillips (now remembered in the Frank Phillips library at Cornell University and online). Morgan was part of the planning team for the August 1929 International Conference to be held at the Institut fὕr Bienenkunde, the Berlin base of the new President, Professor Armbruster. However, James Morgan died suddenly in June from a respiratory condition, the result of the after effects of gas attacks in World War I.

years of Annie Betts
After the death of James Bernard Morgan in 1929, Annie Betts took over as an Editor. She had carried out research on bees since 1908, mostly on pollen and hive fungi, but also authored and edited books on honey bees (Spiller, 1950). Annie Betts was appointed a Director and Secretary of the Apis Club and Editor of The Bee World, on a 3-month probationary term, in July 1929. She was to remain in the post for the next 20 years, not of her own choosing, as she states in her farewell as Editor (Betts, 1949)! Miss Betts had been a member of the Apis Club and her interest in bees went back to her childhood. She was already established as an important contributor to serious bee literature. In her article on "The Fungi of the Beehive" (Betts, 1912) she referred in particular to Pericytis alvei and it is noteworthy that in 1972 this fungus was put in the genus Bettsia, a name created in her honor (Skou, 1972).
Annie Betts was an able mathematician and came from a family with a strong engineering background. Unsurprisingly, therefore, she took up work as an aeronautical engineer in World War I and was involved in the development of aeroplane propellers. Her fascinating notebooks full of drawings and calculations covering this part of her career were in the IBRA library. However, during his period as Director (1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009), Richard Jones, thought that they would be of more relevance and probably more accessed as part of the Royal Aeronautical Society's library and that is where they are now to be found. She remained interested in aircraft into old age. Her mechanical skills were also practical and she maintained her own motor cycle for many years. Carreck (2014) also provides a picture of her home which also served as The Bee World's editorial office in those days.
During her time as Editor, besides editorial duties, she contributed 170 of her own articles. She was very deaf and found attendance at meetings and conferences very difficult but she could read several European languages and used these skills to pursue and expand the international appeal of the journal. World War II made communication with many countries very difficult or impossible. Throughout this dark period in world history, the journal, reduced in size and on poorer quality paper due to severe rationing restrictions, was published on schedule. Although she was very much in control of content, printers seemed to have a reasonably free choice in print and printing styles. In the 1930s, the overall typographical impression was one of stark, rather severe austerity, but gradually more decorative techniques were added to the titles. Her brief to would-be authors continued the now well  (Jones, 2012). She started a modernization process with vigor. BRA, which was always international but did not add the "I" to its title until 1976, now owned the journal.
Dr. Crane became aware that although bees were kept in hives in most parts of the world and much had been written about them there seemed to be no access route or central repository for the wealth of information on the subject. In the space of a few years, the business of collecting, collating, and disseminating information about bees and beekeeping became the dominant task in her life. When she took over editorship of The Bee World it was already a well-established journal and an international link between beekeeping science and practice (Walker & Jones, 2008).
Out of this grew a second source of information, Apicultural Abstracts, which originally was included in the back pages of The Bee World. This section had the express aim of linking isolated workers, institutes, and beekeepers with the research that would help them. Before long, the rapid expansion of scientific research and the resulting amount of published material needing to be covered, led to it becoming a stand-alone journal in its own right. In its 55-year history this journal recorded over 60,000 abstracts and remains a valuable and comprehensive database. It was truly a miracle of its time. It was absolutely unique and invaluable and most of it is still accessible in digital form today through the Eva Crane Trust (www.evacranetrust.org).
In 1952, the journal became Bee World, dropping "The, " and the page size was reduced to 135 mm × 210 mm (Crane, 1952). This year also saw a new cover design based on F. V. Botley's projection of the world map in three hexagons (Figure 1). The smaller page led to the text taking up just one column as opposed to the previous two columns and new features such as "Notices and News" appeared. The year 1962 saw the publication of an index for the first 30 volumes , a work of some magnitude undertaken by Dr. D. J. Campbell and Mr. G. P. Henderson. It has a preface and user instructions in English, French, and German (Campbell & Henderson, 1962).
The same year saw another off-shootthe Journal of Apicultural Research. Now also in the Taylor and Francis portfolio it remains to this day the premier English language vehicle for the publication of cutting edge apicultural research (Carreck, 2011). In 1966, Bee World became quarterly and was styled "a journal of the Bee Research Association" making it, at that time, one of three quarterly publications, all of which were edited by Dr. Eva Crane. In 1976, BRA officially became IBRA, recognition of what it had always been -an international organization. While in 1977, Bee World entered into a formal agreement with the International Commission for Plant Bee Relationships (ICPBR) making it the official organ of the organization.

Adey and Munn
The mid 1980s was a time of troubles and turbulence for both IBRA and Bee World. In an editorial titled "Supersedure, " Crane (1983) announced her impending retirement at the end of 1983. Her intention was to concentrate on writing books which indeed have become seminal works in the world history of beekeeping (Walker & Jones, 2008). From January 1984, the new Director of IBRA (and therefore responsible for its journals) was Cambridge graduate Dr. Margaret Adey. From the second issue of the year she took on the work of editing the journal.  (Griffiths, 1988). Pamela Munn became acting Editor and was soon appointed full time Editor.
One of the first things she did was to issue a clear set of guidelines to would-be contributors to the journal and to take a look at the structure of Bee World. That structure was as shown in Table 2. As can be seen, under Pamela Munn's editorship some major changes occurred. The main body of the material was subject to peer review and items such as news and conferences came under a section entitled "The Buzz. " This gave rise to original articles having long lists of references attached, though references had been included before. The journal had, in essence, become a junior version of the Journal of Apicultural Research.
Some other changes also took place. In Volume 72, the second issue of the year for some inexplicable reason, the cover changed. For many years it had followed the international color code used to mark queens -white (or silver), yellow, red, green, blue -now it changed to a broad band of color down the spine side with the title written vertically sideways from bottom to top and a tinted photo, using a light touch of the same color (just the one color), that was relevant to an inside article. The print layout changed too: articles in The Buzz section reverted to double columns although the text in the main articles still occupied the width of the page. The last issue of Volume 75 in 1994 saw the most eye catching innovation yet with a four page center spread of bee related postage stamps in full color (Shaw & Ching, 1994). In 1996 the cover changed again with fashion and became less strident. The same one color wash was used but the title was across the top and once again reverted to the annual colors used for queens (Figure 1).
Richard Jones as Director of IBRA was still fighting to establish some financial security for the organization and encouraged the next big transformation. This was a huge effort to give the journal a modern and relevant appearance by producing it not only in full color throughout but also in A4 size. This occurred in Vol.

Richard Jones
However, once again the jaws of financial insolvency were snapping ever closer at IBRA and Bee World. Changes had to be made and it was the painful task of the Director of IBRA to spell out these changes in the editorial of the last issue published in the uninterrupted from June 1919 (Jones, 2005). Bee World would cease to exist and would be incorporated into the Journal of Apicultural Research.
a Figure 3.

Today and tomorrow
In 2015 Kirsten Traynor, an American researcher thereby enhancing the journal's already laudable international outlook, was appointed Editor (Traynor, 2014). However, her time was all too brief before she moved on to other things (Figure 4). So in 2017 the present Editor, Robert Brodschneider, an Austrian biologist and bee researcher working at the University of Graz, was appointed (Brodschneider, 2017

Remarkable contributions
Bee World has published more than 6,500 articles during the last 100 years. All contributions have been made available electronically on the journal's website at Taylor and Francis. It is difficult to highlight any particular article, but the impact of scientific articles can be estimated for example by the number of references or electronic downloads an article achieves. The website of Taylor and Francis provides up to date statistics on citations and article downloads from their website (though there are also other sources to obtain the electronic version of an article). The download numbers suggest, that at present two very recent articles on natural resilience of honey bees against the varroa mite (Blacquière & Panziera, 2018;McMullan, 2018) are the most read, which underlines the interest of readers in scientific discussion of real world problems. Among the most cited articles naturally older articles are included. This list is dominated by a methodological article and followed by review articles of general interest to the honey bee community (Table 3). Bee World articles from 1977 to 2005 are indexed in Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science. According to this, the article by Louveaux, Maurizio & Vorwohl (1978) was cited more than 735 times, which means on average this article was cited a  Figure 4. Richard Jones, Kirsten Traynor, and Robert Brodschneider at Eurbee8 in Ghent, Belgium, 2018.