Farm Life Not Always So Idyllic: Dr. Wilson on Ontario Rural History

Quilting bees. Threshing bees. Barn-raisings. Friendly, hard-working neighbours gathering together to get things done. It’s one of those rural traditions that we tend to look back on nostalgically. But there’s another side to these “bees,” says history professor Catharine Wilson. Sometimes, everything went wrong. “There were serious, sometimes fatal, accidents and fights frequently broke out. Some turned into major brawls. I even found information about 16 cases of murder at the bees or right afterwards. She calls them “bees-gone-wrong.”

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