Old Bumble’s Farm finds inspiration from many writers, gardeners, academics and plant practitioners. Some are active today, and some wrote a century or more ago. What they all have in common is respect for the natural world, and a particular desire to make the world a better place for our non-human fellow earthlings. We hope you’ll find some useful information, if not inspiration, on this page.
Who is Old Bumble?
The character of Old Bumble is from the writing of an early 20th century entomologist, Edith Marion Patch, who was also author of many children’s books on nature. When I was visiting a farm and rural life museum at the University of Maine a few years back, I came upon an exhibit about Dr. Patch and both her story and the stories she wrote became a quick topic of interest. Patch’s experience was similar to many scientists who happened to be women in the late 19th and early 20th century–it was a story of discouragement, obstacles and double-standards when these women pursued higher education and a profession in the sciences. Her interest in writing and literature guided her early plans for education, which would lead to a career as a school teacher, a role that many turn of the century educated women settled on. Those plans would not take root.
Patch’s lifelong interest in natural history compelled her to study science at the University of Minnesota, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1897 with research in entomology. Unable to find employment with her science degree, she taught English in high school for a few years before taking a role with the organization of a new Department of Entomology at the University of Maine. In this role, she was paid no salary, but her supervisor arranged for a high school teaching appointment she would use for income while also working for the new department. Patch excelled in her university role and was soon given a paid appointment. She earned a masters degree at the University of Maine and continued her study in the doctoral program at Cornell University, where she became a student,colleague and friend of John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock, both well-known scholars in the field of entomology. Patch’s friendship with Anna, who was an author, illustrator, university professor and early leader in the Nature Study Movement, likely inspired Edith Patch’s successful foray into writing for children alongside her scientific research, appointment as the head of the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station, and election as president of the Entomological Society of America, which at the time had almost exclusively male membership. Patch was a leading authority on the life history of aphids, a common agricultural pest treated with pesticides. In the 1920s, Dr. Patch published a series of articles in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, Scientific Monthly Magazine and in popular newspaper publications about the increasing and indiscriminate use of pesticides, decades before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, one of many interesting biographical and professional parallels of these remarkable scientist writers.
Hexapod Stories was one of two of Edith Patch’s books published by The Atlantic Monthly Press, along with Bird Stories, which combined story telling on the lives of individual creatures in a narrative that was also a lesson in ecology and natural history. These books were designed to be used in elementary school science lessons, as “Little Gateways To Science.” “Old Bumble” is one chapter in Hexapod Stories which tells the story of the life cycle of a queen bumblebee and her family through the year. By the 1920s, Edith Patch was a popular children’s author, making possible collaborations with illustrators like Robert J. Sim, an experienced naturalist and scientific illustrator of the early 20th century. These books still hold a young child’s attention and a perfect opportunity for both child and adult reader to learn a little more about nature.
Patch’s writing is associated with the Nature Study Movement, an educational approach to the natural sciences which prioritized field observation and experiential learning with formal classroom study. This movement had wide influence to conservationists who grew up in the early 20th century, including Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold. Edith Patch was elected president of the American Nature Study Society in 1930, the same year she was elected president of the Entomological Society of America.
