Bill's Bees wishes you a Joyous New Year! We thank all our loyal customers for your continued support, we wish our fellow beekeepers happy, healthy, productive bees, and we thank the bees for the abundance of honey, honey bee products and the joys and adventures of beekeeping. Happy New Year! ~Bill Lewis
Wishing You A Joyous New Year!
Historical Honeybee Articles - Beekeeping History
Image: Bee Chasing Children -Trading Card from Partridges Cafe, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - 15 North 3rd Street and 19 South 8th Street
(estimate circa. 1880 to 1900)
Over a century ago, during the Victorian era, one of the favorite pastimes was collecting small, illustrated advertising cards that we now call trade cards. These trade cards evolved from cards of the late 1700s used by tradesmen to advertise their services. Although examples from the early 1800s exist, it was not until the spread of color lithography in the 1870s that trade cards became plentiful.
By the 1880s, trade cards had become a major way of advertising America's products and services, and a trip to the store usually brought back some of these attractive, brightly colored cards to be pasted into a scrapbook.