Bee Cave, Texas

Everything Bee Cave is known for

1 song mention this city 0 artists from here

Music in Bee Cave

Songs About Bee Cave

Bee Cave
Burns & Warshaw
81%
"Bee Cave"

Artists From Bee Cave

No artists from Bee Cave in the database yet.

Rivers & Roads in Song near Bee Cave

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Bee Cave.

Texas State Highway 71 2 songs Texas Colorado River 6 songs Pedernales River 6 songs Interstate 35 43 songs Blanco River 4 songs Guadalupe River 17 songs

History of Bee Cave

The Dance That Gives Directions RoadyGoat

The town of Bee Cave is named for wild honeybees, and here is one of the strangest things those little insects can do. When a honeybee finds a good patch of flowers, she flies home and dances. Not a figure of speech, an actual dance, on the vertical wall of the comb in the dark. It is called the waggle dance, and it is a real set of directions. She runs in a straight line while shaking her back end, then loops around and does it again, tracing a figure eight. The length of that straight waggle run tells her sisters how far to fly. The angle of the run, measured against straight up, tells them which direction to head relative to the sun. Run straight up the comb, and it means fly toward the sun. Tilt the run forty degrees to the right, and it means fly forty degrees to the right of the sun. An Austrian scientist named Karl von Frisch spent decades cracking this code, and he won a Nobel Prize for it in nineteen seventy-three. So the bees that gave this town its name were not just making honey. They were running a tiny map service, telling each other exactly where to go, using nothing but a wiggle and the position of the sun.

RoadyGoat →

The Honeybee Is an Immigrant RoadyGoat

Here is a fact that surprises almost everyone, and it fits a town named Bee Cave perfectly. The honeybee, the one that makes the honey and lives in those big social hives, is not originally from North America. It was brought over from Europe by settlers in the sixteen hundreds, mostly for its wax and honey. Native peoples reportedly called them the white man's flies, because the bees tended to spread west just ahead of the newcomers. It took those bees more than two centuries to work their way across the continent to the west coast. So when Dietrich Bohls found that cave full of wild honeybees in the Hill Country in the eighteen fifties, those insects were descendants of European stock that had gone feral and set up in the Texas limestone. Meanwhile, North America already had thousands of its own bee species, quietly doing the pollinating long before the honeybee ever showed up. So the town's namesake is, in a sense, a naturalized immigrant that made itself very much at home in a Texas cave. Not the local you might assume, but a hard worker that earned its place on the map.

RoadyGoat →

The Cave That Named the Town RoadyGoat

You are rolling through Bee Cave, and yes, the name is exactly what it sounds like. Back in the early eighteen fifties, a settler named Dietrich Bohls moved his family out from Austin to the spot where Barton Creek meets Little Barton Creek. The limestone banks along that water were riddled with wild Mexican honeybee colonies, and one hollow in the rock was so full of hives that folks just called it the bee cave. The story goes that it was large enough for a person to step right inside, and word spread far enough that curious visitors came from all over to have a look at the buzzing walls. When the post office opened in eighteen seventy, it took the name Bee Caves, with a fellow named Martin Lackey as the first postmaster. So this is not a made-up cute name or a coincidence. There really was a cave, there really were bees, and the town carried both forward. Most of those wild hives are long gone from the city itself now, but every time you say Bee Cave, you are naming a real hole in the Hill Country rock that once hummed like a live wire.

RoadyGoat →

Baker Mayfield at Lake Travis High School

Baker Mayfield, Lake Travis HS (junior 2011, senior 2012, grad 2013). 25-2 as starter. Led 2011 Texas 4A state title as a junior, the program's 5th straight (2007-2011). Junior year: 3,788 pass yds, 45 TD, 5 INT. Career: 6,255 yds, 67 TD. Lightly recruited (only mid-major offers). Walk-on at Texas Tech (started opener as true freshman), then walk-on at Oklahoma; first walk-on to win the Heisman (2017). Sources: Wikipedia, MaxPreps, texashsfootball.com, ESPN, Tulsa World.

Sports Alumni →

Bee Cave, TX

1850

Bee Cave is at the intersection of State Highway 71 and Farm roads 620 and 2244, fourteen miles west of Austin in west central Travis County, and encoupasses a two square mile area with 8,800 acres of extraterritorial jurisdiction. It was settled in the early 1850s by Dietrich Bohls, who relocated near the confluence of Barton Creek and Little Barton Creek and founded what became known as Bee Cave, Texas. The town was named for a large cave swarmed by Mexican honeybees that lived on the creek banks and encompassed much of Western Travis County. A post office opened there under the name Bee Caves in 1870 with Martin V. Lackey as postmaster. By 1871 Will Johnson was operating a trading post at the settlement. In the mid-1880s the Bee Cave community had a steam gristmill, a cotton gin, a general store, a church, a school, and twenty residents. The population fell to ten in the early 1890s but rose to fifty-four by 1914. The post office was discontinued in 1915, and mail for the community was sent to Cedar Valley. The Bee Cave school was consolidated with the Teck common school district in the 1940s and with the Dripping Springs Independent School District in Hays County in 1951. The population was reported at fifty from the 1940s through the 1980s, and the town incorporated in 1987. The village of Bee Cave originially formed as a Type-A General Law city with an Alderman-Mayor form of government. In 1990 it was 241, and it grew to 656 in 2000. By that time Bee Cave had schools, parks and recreational facilities, and a public library. In 2006, the village of Bee Cave became a town, and by 2010 the population reached 3,925. In February 2013, a commission formed and voters approved the new Home Rule Charter in May. An elected City Council consisting of the mayor and five other members set policies for the City government. As of 2015, the city of Bee Cave had an estimated population of 6,515 in city limits with an additional 4,533 living in Extra-Terratorial Jurisdiction for a total of 11,048.

Tsha Handbook →

Lohmans Crossing

1867

A native of Hanover, Germany, John Henry Lohmans emigrated to Texas in 1842. He settled in Austin where he opened a large dairy farm. In 1867 he moved into this area west of Austin and cleared a farm out of the abundant timberland. Lohmans worked on several road construction projects in the area and privately financed the building of Lohmans Ford Road. Lohmans Crossing Road (.5 mi. W) follows the general path of the early route. Lohmans Ford Road, along with others in the area, was significant in the formation of an early Colorado River crossing network. (1985)

Historical Marker → · 4.2 mi away

Roberts-Teague Cemetery

1898

In the 1860s, the Roberts and Teague families came to the Bee Cave area where, for generations, their skills as farmers, ranchers, cedar choppers, coal kiln burners, and homemakers helped to shape its development and culture. It is said that this cemetery was established in 1898 when Joseph Roberts (1843-1925) offered the site to the grieving Simons family for an infant's burial. A number of veterans are laid to rest here, including Alfred R. (Buck) Simpson (1895-1961), the second most decorated soldier of World War I. This burial ground records the lives of the pioneers and families of these once isolated canyons of Travis County. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2001

Historical Marker → · 4.3 mi away

Lakeway, TX

1962

Lakeway is on Lake Travis and State Highway 620, five miles west of Mansfield Dam in west Travis County. It was founded on the site of a 2,700-acre ranch owned by Houston oilman and rancher Jack (Jake) Josey. In early 1962 three Houston men associated with the Gulfmont Hotel Company-G. Flint Sawtelle, John H. Crooker, Jr., and Lee Blocker-obtained a sixty-day option to purchase the land and plan a hotel and resort community. The name Lakeway was a natural sequel to Gulfmont's Fairway Motor Hotel in McAllen, Texas, so named because it overlooked the fairway of a golf course. The partnership then expanded to a group of ten people, who purchased 880 acres named Josey 1, on which they planned to build an inn and develop a residential community. They bought an additional 2,817 acres in 1964. The inn was owned by the ten partners through a subsidiary known as Lakeway Joint Ventures and leased to the Gulfmont Hotel Company as operators. At the same time the Lakeway Land Company was formed with Flint Sawtelle as president, for the development of real estate. Property sales began on May 30, 1963, and the grand opening of the Lakeway Inn and Marina took place in July. The Lakeway Land Company was sold to a Dallas group known as Alpert Investment Corporation on April 26, 1971, when there were 300 homes in Lakeway and 1,000 acres had been developed. In July 1974 a substantial majority of resident and nonresident property owners voted to incorporate with the consent of the city of Austin, and the 1,200-acre village of Lakeway resulted. Residents also elected a three-man governing commission, including Newt Herndon, Lakeway's first mayor. The population of Lakeway was 1,020 in 1984, and that of the greater Lakeway area was 3,120. In 1990 the population of Lakeway was 4,044. That figure almost doubled to 8,002 by 2000.

Tsha Handbook → · 3.6 mi away

Oak Hill

1856

First settlers arrived in area in 1840s. The community founded here in 1856 was called Live Oak Springs; in 1865 it was renamed Shiloh. Later schools known as Live Oak and Oatmanville Gave names temporarily to the settlement. It has been known as Oak Hill since 1900. Limestone quarries were opened, 1882, to supply stone for capitol building in Austin. By 1886, ten carloads of stone were shipped daily over railroad which joined quarries with capitol grounds. It is estimated that one-third of capitol's walls are line with limestone from Oak Hill quarries. Incise on base: Sponsored by Oakhill-Cedar Valley Pioneer Association

Historical Marker → · 7.6 mi away

Things to Do in Bee Cave

food 14.0 mi away
Franklin Barbecue

Legendary Austin BBQ with 2-3 hour waits. Obama waited in line here.
nature 10.1 mi away
Hamilton Pool Preserve

A natural swimming hole under a 50-foot waterfall in a collapsed grotto.
quirky 10.1 mi away
Hamilton Pool

A domed grotto of limestone where an underground river collapsed thousands of years ago and left a fifty-foot waterfall spilling into a jade-green pool.…
quirky 10.5 mi away
Willie Nelson's Luck Ranch

Willie built his own ghost town on his Spicewood ranch for the 1986 movie Red Headed Stranger -- a whole frontier village with a saloon chapel livery and…
historical 11.0 mi away
The Broken Spoke

James White built the Broken Spoke out of cinder blocks on South Lamar in 1964 and stubbornly refused to let Austin grow up around it. Willie Nelson Bob Wills…
nature 11.8 mi away
Barton Springs

Barton Springs is the main outflow of the Edwards Aquifer right in the middle of Austin. Thirty-one million gallons of sixty-eight-degree water pour out of a…
quirky 13.3 mi away
Congress Avenue Bridge Bats

When Austin rebuilt the Congress Avenue Bridge in 1980 the new design accidentally created perfect crevices for Mexican free-tailed bats. By the mid-1990s one…
historical 13.5 mi away
Texas State Capitol

The Texas Capitol in Austin is taller than the US Capitol in Washington -- three hundred and eight feet to two hundred and eighty-eight -- because Texas wanted…

Everything Near Bee Cave

1160 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

Explore Bee Cave on the Map
All music from Texas → · Browse more cities