Tucked in the unglaciated region of southwestern Wisconsin is a treasured historical site featuring a re-created rural village and museum. Stonefield Village near Cassville, WI, is a state historical site that showcases what a rural village would have looked like back at the turn of the 19th Century. Wisconsin, the dairy state, surely can be designated the ‘land of milk and honey’ since Adam Grimm from Jefferson, Wisconsin was instrumental in bringing the Italian queen bee to America.Wisconsin also was the home of G.B. Lewis Beeware and presently has several bee supply houses and commercial beekeepers. The University of Wisconsin houses the Dr. C.C. Miller collection of books on beekeeping. In about 1964, the Wisconsin Honey Producers donated a honey house to Stonefield Village. It is patterned after an 1890s honey house near West Bend, Wisconsin. The honey house displays a wonderful variety of old beekeeping tools and paraphernalia.Hand-made hives….some of the first removable frame hives in the state…and an old wooden centrifugal extractor are on display.Old smokers, a Bingham uncapping knife, hive tool, basswood section boxes, comb foundation mills and a vintage straw skep are all exhibited. Wisconsin had a flourishing honey industry in the early years. White sweet clover, yellow sweet clover, and alsike clover were all planted as forage crops and to condition the soil with the nitrogen in the roots. Basswood trees and black locust flourished. Before the advent of the movable frame hive, the Wisconsin beekeeper would have smoked the bees out of trees before cutting the tree down to harvest the honey. Log gums and straw skeps were the next step in the progression of keeping bees. No wonder the early consumer doubted the veracity of liquid honey. Most honey was merely cut in chunks from the comb and served to the family. The late 1800s brought American foulbrood to Wisconsin and, in 1898, Wisconsin appointed a state apiary inspector to teach beekeepers in the state how to manage their bee yards to fight the disease. Today, school students on field trips, families, and vacationers all revisit the past at the rural Wisconsin village of the 1890s – Stonefield Village near Cassville, Wisconsin.The honey house is always open and is a wonderful display of how today’s beekeeping evolved.