The threat of the Asian hornet, and more notably, the environmental impact of pesticides have surely raised public consciousness of the dangers of bee mortality and the deadly consequences of their extinction to the planet.
In connection with bees and beekeeping, let us review a former custom, vanished sometime between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, according to which house bees were to be told of the death of their keeper. We are of course talking about a time when most farmsteads kept honeybees.