BEE HOUSE, TEXAS. Bee House is on Farm Road 183 eleven miles west of Gatesville in western Coryell County. The community was established in the 1850s as Boyd's Cove, named for James Boyd. In 1884 residents applied for a post office to be called Bee Hive, for the many bees in local cliffs and caves, but the postal service issued the name of Bee House. By the mid-1890s Bee House had a general store, a corn mill, four churches, and 150 residents. From the mid-1880s until 1916 a Masonic lodge held meetings on the upper floor of the community's two-story schoolhouse; in 1904 the Bee House school had seventy-eight students and two teachers. Bee House declined during the late 1930s, and the population fell to fifty by 1940. A church and a post office marked the community on county highway maps in the 1980s. The reported population was forty in 1990 and 2000.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coryell County Genealogical Society, Coryell County, Texas, Families, 1854-1985 (Dallas: Taylor, 1986). Zelma Scott, History of Coryell County (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1965).

Vivian Elizabeth Smyrl