John Harvey Lovell

Background

Lovell was born on October 21, 1860, in Waldoboro, Maine, the son of Harvey Hinckley Lovell, a sea captain, and Sophronia Caroline Bulfinch. His father died in 1898, leaving him a fine house on the Medomac River and enough wealth to provide him with an income for life.

Education

An interest in natural history led Lovell to study science at Amherst, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated in 1882. In 1899 he returned to Amherst and earned a master of arts degree.

Career

Lovell taught school in Nobleboro and Norridgewock, Maine, but he resigned when his father became seriously ill. He also had a fruit farm.

The particular focus of John Lovell’s researches was established when he read Hermann Muller’s Fertilization of Flowers. The correlation which Müller had described between the colors of flowers and the kinds of insects that were attracted to them was repudiated by Felix Plateau in 1895. One of the main goals of Lovell’s early studies on the colors of flowers and color preferences of insects was to substantiate Muller’s findings.

Lovell found that the identification of wild bees was often difficult, and he decided to make a special study of them. He collected over 8,000 Apoidea specimens and described, sometimes with the assistance of Theodore D. A. Cockerell, thirty-two new species.

Lovell’s interest in bees and pollination soon led him to the study of apiculture and the photography of flowers. He combined these interests in The Flower and the Bee and Honey Plants of North America, each of which contains more than 100 of his plant photographs.

Many of his photographs were also reproduced with his articles in the American Bee Journal and in about a thousand articles on plants which he wrote, beginning in 1926, for the Boston Globe and other newspapers.

Achievements

• Lovell is best known for his studies on the interaction of flowers and bees and is credited with recording 32 bee species. He wrote hundreds of journal and newspaper articles on biology.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Colors Of Northern Gamopetalous Flowers

    (Volume 1)

  • The Colors Of Northern Gamopetalous Flowers

    (Volume 2)

  • The Colors Of Northern Polypetalous Flowers 1902

Membership

• Knox Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

Connections

On October 24, 1899, Lovell married Lottie Magune. She took an interest in his work and often assisted in collecting, labeling, and cataloging his insects. They had two sons, Harvey Bulfinch Lovell and Ralph Marston Lovell. Harvey developed interests similar to his father’s and received a Ph.D. in zoology from Harvard in 1933. They collaborated on six papers on flower pollination from 1932 to 1939.

Father:

Harvey Hinckley Lovell

Mother:

Sophronia Caroline Bulfinch

Spouse:

Lottie Magune

Son:

Harvey Bulfinch Lovell

Son:

Ralph Marston Lovell

colleague:

Theodore Cockerell

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 7
  1973