Hugo von Buttel-Reepen

Hugo-Berthold von Buttel-Reepen (originally Reepen) (born February 12, 1860 in Bremen , † November 7, 1933 in Oldenburg ) was a German zoologist , bee researcher and museum director.

Life

Hugo-Bertold Reepen was born in 1860 as the son of the Bremen merchant Georg Reepen (1818–1906) and his wife Astra Helene, née von Buttel (1835–1878). His mother was the daughter of the Oldenburg Prime Minister Dietrich Christian von Buttel ; his maternal great-grandfather was Johann Heinrich von Thünen .

Reepen attended high school in Bremen and Oldenburg and then began an agricultural apprenticeship in Mecklenburg and Holstein . However, he had to stop this because of a lung disease. In 1885 he traveled to East India , where he wanted to settle down as a merchant and plantation owner. Because of malaria he had to give up these plans in 1887 and returned to Germany, where he moved to his aunt Minna von Buttel (* 1838, † 1931) after a long convalescence leave. She adopted him in 1900, so that from then on he bore the name of Buttel-Reepen . During his stay in India, he developed scientific and ethnological interests. In 1897 he therefore undertook an extended trip to Chile.

To catch a scientific education, he started in 1898 at the age of 38 years a university degree in zoology and paleontology, which he in 1902 with a doctorate in zoology for Dr. rer. nat. graduated in Freiburg . He then went back to Oldenburg and devoted himself to scientific studies as a private scholar. His fortune allowed him to pursue his interests free from financial constraints. In Oldenburg, he concentrated his research primarily on the tribal history, behavior and biology of bees, on which he published numerous articles and studies. In 1911/12 he undertook a research trip to Java , Sumatra and Malacca on behalf of the Prussian Academy of Sciences to study state-building insects. Buttel-Reepen also devoted himself intensively to the practice of beekeeping . He was a co-founder of the Central Bee Management Association in Oldenburg, in which he played a leading role. He also founded the Oldenburg Beekeeping School in 1921, which he took over as head, and was chairman of the research committee of the German Beekeeping Association . After the loss of his fortune due to the German inflation , Buttel-Reepen had to look for a job. From 1922 to 1924 he was employed by the Landesbrandkasse and was then appointed director of the state natural science museum , which he directed until his death. Buttel-Reepen died on November 7, 1933 in Oldenburg.

Bee science studies

As a beekeeper , Buttel-Reepen worked intensively on beekeeping. He published essays on tribal history and the biology of bees. In it he turned against a purely mechanistic interpretation of bees as a mere reflex machine, but at the same time warned against humanizing their apparently intelligent behavior. He realized that bees apparently have a memory and that they are able to process experiences. He believed that bees can communicate with one another using a very developed spoken language.

He made a significant contribution to the systematics and taxonomy of honey bees . He applied a strict species definition and reduced the number of known bee species to three, to which he assigned all other previously known bee species as subspecies: Apis dorsata. Apis florea and Apis mellifera. To this end, he made considerations on the phylogenetic development of honey bees, which were based primarily on his observations on the social behavior of solitary bees and the honeybees that formed the state. von Buttel-Reepen gave the heather bee, an ecotype of the dark bee, the Latin name Apis mellifera lehzeni and was the first to describe the Asian red honey bee , which he named Apis koschevnikovi in honor of the Russian bee scientist Grigorij Aleksandrovič Koževnikov (1866-1933) .

Publications

• Are the bees reflex machines? Experimental contributions to the biology of the honeybee . Georg Thieme-Verlag, Leipzig 1900.
• The phylogenetic development of the bee state and contributions to the way of life of solitary and social bees (bumblebees, meliponins, etc.). G. Thieme, Leipzig 1903. doi: 10.5962 / bhl.title.11069
• Are the drones made from fertilized eggs? Göhmann, 1904.
• About the current state of knowledge of the gender-determining causes in the honey bee (apis mellifica L.): a contribution to the theory of gender preformation: Lecture given at the zoological congress in Tübingen. Wilhelm Engelmann, 1904.
• From the development of mankind: primitive man before and during the Ice Age in Europe. G. Fischer-Verlag, Jena 1911.
• My experiences with the "thinking" horses. Gustav Fischer-Verlag, 1913.
• On the Psychobiology of Bumblebees: Dysteleologists in Nature. Volume 1, Thieme-Verlag, 1914.
• The problem of the Elberfeld horses and telepathy. 1914.
• Life and essence of bees. 1915.
• A strange effect of the "mite disease" in America! Fischer-Verlag, 1922.
• About window urns. Volume I and Volume II, Gerhard Stalling Verlag, Oldenburg 1925 (Volume I) and 1927 (Volume II)
• The barrows of Höltinghausen. In: Oldenburg yearbook of the society for antiquity and regional history. 1926.
• To the prehistory of Northwest Germany. Oldenburg 1930.
• A new find of primitive man in Germany (Homo visurgensis). In: Mannus - Journal for German Prehistory. 22, 1930, pp. 169-170.

literature

• Hans Friedl u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual for the history of the state of Oldenburg . Edited on behalf of the Oldenburg landscape. Isensee, Oldenburg 1992, ISBN 3-89442-135-5 , p. 120 ( PDF ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ K. v. Fresh: Buttel-Reepen, Hugo Berthold von. In: New German Biography. 3 (1957), p. 80 [online version]; URL: http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd117185701.html
2. ^ R. Vierhaus: Buttel-Reepen, Hugo Bertold von. In: German Biographical Encyclopedia. 2, Volume 2. Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2005, p. 254.
3. ^ HR Hepburn, SE Radloff: Honeybees of Asia . Springer, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-642-16422-4 , p. 24f.
4. ↑ H. v. Buttel-Reepen: Apistica. Contributions to the systematics, biology and the historical and geographical distribution of the honey bee (Apis mellifica L.), its varieties and the other Apis species. In: Messages from the Zoological Museum in Berlin. 1906, pp. 117-201.
5. ↑ Entry on the Heidebiene in the beekeeping lexicon ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the homepage of the State Association of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg Beekeepers, accessed on June 28, 2014.