About the Research

Every historical and scientific claim on this site clears a verification pass before it ships, that's the whole point of a reference site. A book is one author's voice; a reference implicitly claims to have checked. So it does.

Bee-science facts are sourced to the original study, not a secondhand summary, wherever the original was reachable. Historical claims (mostly Civil War-era, by design) were checked against contemporary accounts and, where a popular version of a story exists, against the scholarship that's actually examined it. A few well-known anecdotes turned out not to hold up under that scrutiny and were left out entirely rather than softened.

Each chapter page cites its sources inline: the study and finding behind a bee-science fact, the primary sources behind a historical record, the edition and page behind a quoted epigraph. Where a chapter's book text makes a deliberate editorial choice (for example, choosing not to complicate a story with a figure's mixed record), that choice is noted here rather than silently carried over or silently overridden.

This site is a companion to the book, not a copy of it. Long-form narrative, the personal story, the full argument of a chapter, stays in the book. What lives here is the structured reference: the facts, the primary sources, and the pieces that don't work on a printed page.