Blue plaque for beekeeping queen

BEEKEEPING queen Eva Crane will be commemorated with a blue plaque on the Hull house where she once lived.

The plaque at 55 Newland Park will be unveiled at noon on June 12, the centenary of her birth.

Dr Eva Crane OBE, born Ethel Eva Widdowson in London in 1912, was a mathematician and physicist who became fascinated by bees after she and husband James Crane received a hive for a wedding present in 1942.

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She travelled the world gathering material for a series of books which are legendary in the bee world.

But for many years, Dr Crane’s day job was lecturing on nuclear physics, first at Sheffield University and then at Hull, where she was living when she founded the Bee Research Association in 1949. She later moved south and died in Slough, Berkshire, in 2007.

Beverley Beekeepers’ Association and Hull Council arranged the plaque, which will be the first to commemorate her life.

Dr Crane travelled until she was nearly 90, to look at bee-keeping in rural corners of 60 countries, and became convinced that it had originated in the Zagros mountains on the borders of Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

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