author
Mrs. Lizzie E. Cotton
b. 1845
A 19th-century Maine beekeeper, inventor, and practical writer, she turned hands-on experience into clear advice for people who wanted to make beekeeping pay. Her work offers a lively window into early American apiculture and the confidence of a woman building her own place in it.
2 Audiobooks
Bee Keeping for Profit. A New System of Bee Management (1891) Third Edition.
by Mrs. Lizzie E. Cotton
Bee Keeping for Profit. A New System of Bee Management (1880) First Edition.
by Mrs. Lizzie E. Cotton
About the author
Mrs. Lizzie E. Cotton was an American beekeeping author active in the late 1800s, best known for Bee Keeping for Profit: A New System of Bee Management. Her writing presents beekeeping as a practical business, with a strong emphasis on methods that ordinary readers could use to improve honey production and manage colonies more effectively.
Sources from the period connect her with West Gorham, Maine, and show that she promoted her own ideas about hive design and bee management. That mix of writing, experimenting, and selling practical knowledge helped her stand out at a time when beekeeping guides were often tied to new equipment and changing methods.
Today, she is remembered mainly through her surviving beekeeping books and circulars, which continue to interest historians of agriculture and readers curious about women’s work, rural enterprise, and the history of apiculture in the United States.