Burton N. (Burton Noble) Gates

Burton N. Gates was an American apiarist, teacher, and agricultural researcher whose career centered on the scientific study of honey bees. Records connected with Massachusetts Agricultural College place him in Amherst as an associate professor of bee keeping and as an apiary specialist, showing how closely his work tied together teaching, research, and public service.

He is especially associated with early 20th-century writing on bee colonies and apiary management. One of his best-known publications, The Temperature of the Bee Colony (1914), reflects the kind of careful, observation-based work that helped shape modern beekeeping science.

Gates is remembered less as a literary figure than as a clear, practical scientific writer. For listeners interested in natural history, farming, or the history of applied science, his work offers a window into a period when beekeeping was becoming a disciplined field of research.