Eva Crane was a towering figure in the field of beekeeping, one of its most knowledgeable practitioners and prolific historians, and a powerful champion of bees as a scientific subject. Her career in the field began when she was given a hive as a wedding present in 1942; she became interested not in the bees themselves but in, as she put it, “how they worked. . . how different peoples have kept bees, which bees and why, and why they keep them in the hives they do”.

Unable to find anything much of use in the way of articles she became a member and secretary of the British Beekeepers Association research subcommittee, and in 1949 founded the Bee Research Association (a charity, renamed the International Bee Research Association in 1976). She was its director until she retired in 1984, by which time it had become a key resource in bee research, primarily through its journals.

Crane never lost her hunger for “exciting bee things”, travelling all over the world in search of them, and she produced numerous books admired for their encyclopaedic and authoritative treatment of their subject matter.

Ethel Eva Widdowson was born in 1912 and grew up in Dulwich. She was educated at Sydenham Secondary School in Kent and King’s College London, where she read maths, one of only two women. After completing her degree two years later she took an MSc in quantum mechanics, and was awarded a PhD in nuclear physics from London University in 1938. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the University of Sheffield in 1941.

She married James Crane, a stockbroker, the following year. On receiving her first swarm of bees, intended as as a contribution to the war effort, she subscribed to Bee World and became a member of the Sheffield Beekeepers Association: “It consisted mostly of elderly men who said ‘You’re a beginner for the first 20 years’. ” When her husband left the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve she gave up teaching and was able to focus on her bee studies with new seriousness.

Crane was keen to draw attention to the very great potential of beekeeping in the tropics, and from the beginning her research association, whose mission is to “increase awareness of the vital role of bees in the environment and to encourage the use of bees as wealth creators”, was international in outlook.

Crane became editor of the nontechnical magazine Bee World in 1949 and expanded its content to include summaries of scientific papers and books relevant to the science of bees and beekeeping. When it became clear that an entirely new platform for such content was desirable she founded The Journal of Apicultural Research. In 1950 she also founded Apicultural Abstracts, which aimed to give a complete survey of research and technical developments concerning all bees and bee-related subjects.

Crane began to travel all over the world, lecturing and advising governments on beekeeping practices (but, by her own account, learning much more than she taught). She visited, among many countries, Vietnam, Nepal, Uganda, Egypt, Malaysia and Russia, observing along the way that “this curious passion for a small insect can transcend barriers of politics, race and language, and bring strangers together as friends”. Her many discoveries included, in the Upper Indus Valley in Pakistan, the use of horizontal hives exactly like ones discovered in excavations of Ancient Greece.

By the early 1960s the association was communicating with more than 400 research institutes worldwide, and producing material exported to 80 countries. Crane was an impressive figurehead who, as one journalist observed, could “quote Herodotus or apicultural research figures with equal ease”. After an appeal in 1961 for £25,000 the association was moved in 1966 from Crane’s house to new headquarters in Chalfont St Peter. In 1985 it was moved again, to Cardiff.

Crane established the Eva Crane Trust to advance the science of apiology and encourage bee research for the public benefit, and the Eva Crane Library, now held at the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, holds about 60,000 scientific papers and a unique collection of 130 different bee journals, many of them dating back to their first issues in the 19th century and in some cases representing the only complete sets in existence.

Crane was fanatical about accuracy and contributed more than once to discussions in The Times (adding in a letter of 1953 that “A most intriguing report has come, via Argentina, of a new wartime use for bees – it is stated that the Japanese used them as messengers for carrying microscopic documents across Russian lines. How this was done I have not been able to discover: it is possible in theory but would present many difficulties in practice”).

Crane produced more than 180 scientific papers, articles and books on bees, honey and beekeeping; her books include Honey: a Comprehensive Survey (1975), A Book of Honey (1980), The Archaeology of Beekeeping (1983), Bees and Beekeeping: Science, Practice and World Resources(1990) , The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (1999) and, a book about her travels, Making a Bee-Line (2003).

They embrace all eras and peoples, from Aristotle, who wrote that honey “falls from the air principally at the rising of the stars and when a rainbow rests upon the earth”, to Arthur Dobbs of Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, who discovered the important role bees play in pollination, to the British troops in East Africa who left trip wires in the jungle so that log hives of bees would fall on the Germans.

In 1986 Crane was made the honorary life president of the International Bee Research Association, and the same year she was appointed OBE.

Crane’s husband died in 1978.

Eva Crane, OBE, authority on beekeeping, was born on June 12, 1912. She died on September 6, 2007, aged 95