The King of Bees and His Heir Apparent

After reading the description of the feats of conjuring and bee-training by “Mr. Wildman” in London quoted yesterday, I went looking for more about that man.

It turns out:

• There were two men named Wildman attracting attention in London at this time, and many books mix them up.
• I never found a British source for that particular description of Wildman’s act, but found enough overlapping descriptions to be confident about who performed it.
• Those other descriptions are even more wild!

One of my sources is an Eighteenth-Century Life article by Deirdre Coleman of the University of Sydney titled “Entertaining Entomology: Insects and Insect Performers in the Eighteenth Century.” Others are books on public entertainers in London published over the decades, including Ricky Jay’s Extraordinary Exhibitions. However, I might sort out the two Wildmans differently from those references.

So let’s meet the Wildman family.

In 1754 some British gentlemen founded the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in Great Britain, eventually known as the Royal Society of Arts. In the summer of 1766 a man from Plymouth in western England named Thomas Wildman (1734–1781) demonstrated various tricks with bees to this group. A newspaper described one of his visits to the society’s secretary:

About five o’clock Mr. Wildman came, brought through the city in a chair, his head and face almost covered with bees, and a most venerable beard of them hanging down from his chin. The gentlemen and ladies were soon convinced that they need not be afraid of the bees, and therefore went up familiarly to Mr. Wildman, and conversed with him. After having staid a considerable time, he gave orders to the bees to retire to their hive that was brought for them, which they immediately obeyed with the greatest precipitation.

That was so impressive that the society granted Wildman £105 (a hundred guineas) to publish his secrets for the benefit of the public.

Over the next two years Wildman appeared publicly with his bees several times, not revealing secrets. Coleman’s article states:

Attired in his “bee dress,” Wildman would usually perform with up to three different swarms of bees “which he made fly in and out of their hives at pleasure.” At the conclusion of one act, he grabbed handfuls of bees and “tossed them up and down like so many peas” before making them “go into their hive at the word of command.”

Wildman accepted the title of “king of bees.” Ironically, he probably controlled the swarms by moving around their queens.

In 1768 Wildman published A Treatise on the Management of Bees; wherein is Contained the Natural History of those Insects; with the Various Methods of Cultivating Them. This book was a digest of old lore and recent European writing about beekeeping translated by the Society of Arts secretary. It included fold-out copper-plate engravings of bees and hives, as shown above. Among the men subscribing for an early copy was Benjamin Franklin. A second edition was printed in 1770.

By 1772, Thomas Wildman was joined in the capital by his nephew Daniel Wildman (d. 1812). The younger Wildman had an even wilder approach to showing off bees. In June of that year he performed at the Jubilee Gardens, and in July at Richard Astley’s Riding-School in London. The name of the latter establishment is the tip-off that Daniel Wildman’s act included not just bees but horses.

Specifically, a June 1772 announcement said:

The celebrated Daniel Wildman will exhibit several new and amazing experiments, never attempted by any man in this or any other kingdom before, the rider standing upright, one foot on the saddle, and one on the neck, with a mask of bees on his head and face.

He also rides, standing upright on the saddle, with the bridle in his mouth, and by firing a pistol makes one part of the bees march over the table, and the other swarm in the air and return to their hive again, with other performances too tedious to insert.

And that wasn’t all. As shown by the advertisement quoted in the Boston Evening-Post 250 years ago this week and others, Daniel Wildman performed conjuring tricks with coins, cards, watches, “his Oriental caskets,” and live birds. (At least he promised that one “Fowl shall be alive and perfectly well as before the” performance.)

It’s striking that the Evening-Post item said nothing about Wildman as a trick rider even though someone sent it to the newspaper in response to the equestrian exhibitions of Jacob Bates. Evidently Daniel Wildman had so many talents that he could tailor his act to the venue, small and intimate or big and brash.

TOMORROW: Settling down with the bees.