Alfred James Attridge was the son of Henry Attridge and his wife Prudence Jane Littlel, and a brother of the bee expert Henry L. Attridge*. He became the leading authority on bees in the Cape Province when Henry moved to Natal. He was involved in beekeeping from an early age in England and while still a boy lost his right hand in an accident with a circular saw while making beehives. He came to the Cape Colony in or before the eighteen-nineties and settled in Cape Town. For many years he gave lectures and demonstrations on beekeeping, particularly at the Rosebank Agricultural Show. From January 1916 to December 1919 he was the editor of the Western Province Bee Journal. Perhaps his most important contribution to the subject was his book, Beekeeping in South Africa; a book for beginners (Johannesburg, 1917, 95 pp). It was revised and expanded several times, with a fourth edition appearing in 1933. Just before his death he published an article on 'Punic or African bees and parthenogenesis' in the American Bee Journal (1939).

List of sources:

Google Scholar. http://scholar.google.co.za Publications by A.J. Attridge.

Henry Attridge. Ancestry. Retrieved on 23 January 2023 from https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/henry-attridge-24-jcp3cx

National Automated Archival Information Retrieval System (NAAIRS), at http://www.national.archives.gov.za/naairs.htm Documents relating to Attridge, Alfred James / Attridge, A.J.

South African bibliography to the year 1925. Vol. 1-4, London: Mansell, 1979; Vol. 5, Cape Town: SA Library, 1991.

Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa (SESA). Cape Town: NASOU, 1970-1976.

Compiled by: C. Plug

Last updated: 2023-01-23 10:25:23