Anna Botsford Comstock

How to Keep Bees. By Anna Botsford Comstock

The basics of beekeeping for the beginner, whether you're a backyard beekeeper, homesteader, hobby farmer or a small farmer looking to start a business selling honey and other bee products. Anna Botsford Comstock (September 1, 1854 - August 24, 1930) was an American artist, educator, conservationist, and a leader of the nature study movement, born in Otto, New York, to Marvin and Phebe Irish Botsford. Comstock grew up on her parents' farm, where she and her Quaker mother spent time together examining the wildflowers, birds, and trees. Comstock attended the Chamberlain Institute and Female College, a Methodist school in Randolph, New York, then she returned to Otto and taught for a year. In 1874, Comstock entered Cornell University in Ithaca, New York where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. She left Cornell after two years. In 1878, at the age of 24, she married John Henry Comstock, a young entomologist on the Cornell faculty who got her interested in insect illustration. Throughout her life, Comstock illustrated her husband's lectures and publications on insects. She had no formal training in this illustration; she would study an insect under a microscope then draw it. While her husband was chief entomologist in the U. S. Department of Agriculture from 1879 to 1881, she prepared the drawings for his 1880 Report of the Entomologist on citrus scale insects. She then reentered Cornell and received a degree in natural history in 1885. Then she studied wood engraving at Cooper Union, New York City, so she could prepare illustrations for her husband's book Introduction to Entomology in 1888. Also in 1888, she was one of the first four women admitted to Sigma Xi, a national honor society for the sciences.