I was quite taken with this little article from the spring of 1958, when what is now called Beer Bike was still “the bike race.” I’m not interested in that at all, however. What caught my attention was Dr. Davies’s (former) bee hives, whose existence I had not previously suspected:
I knew that we still have a bee hive somewhere so I walked around the edges of campus until I found it. It turned out to be even more charming than I expected:
Bonus: An alert colleague found these guys wandering around the quad this morning, apparently looking for the heron seating section.
Meine Damen und Heron? 😊
lol
Yellow-crowned Night-Heron
Nyctanassa violacea
They nest in the trees near the main gate, probably near where Dr. Davies kept his bees.
The picnic had cold slaw. I bet it tastes better than hot slaw.
Good catch, Bill. Sharp eye. Are you related to Hart Peebles, Jr. ’59?
To the best of my knowledge, I am not.
Thanks, Bill.
1.27 miles would be approximately one and 1/2 laps of the Inner Loop.
Stop 122 on Bud Morehead’s 1990 second edition of, “A Walking Tour of the Rice University” (p52 – https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/35959/walkingtourofric00more.pdf):
“Here we see the Biology Lecture Hall, a later addition to the group, and the open court between biology on the left and geology on the right. When the biology building was originally constructed, a small horizontal slot was cut in one of the green marble panels on the north side. Through this slot hundreds of honeybees moved in and out from their hive inside the building. The queen and some of the bees had been brought from the Physics Building in 1958. It was a fascinating experience to search for the queen, who lived under glass so that the hive could be monitored. Alas, this prolific lady and her family no longer exist.”
Searching rice.edu for “Davies” and “bees” turned up the April 5, 1957, edition of the Thresher (https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/66173/thr19570405.pdf?sequence=1)
But those search terms were not in the same article.
Instead, there was the first in a three-part series about beekeeping (in the April 5, 12 & 26 issues) by Ed Summers. (Intro: “In the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of birds and bees. This is about bees, but it’s for the birds.”)
Dr. Davies was mentioned in a page 8 article about the upcoming 3-day Junior and Senior weekends at Rio Vista and Lake Travis, respectiively. “Chaperoning the (Juniors’) melee will be
the tasks of Doctors Davies and Kolenda, one of the highlights of the weekend is sure to be the notorious rope swan dive by Dr. Davies.”