The German-language periodical was published by the Gossner Mission, Berlin. The Mission was founded by Johannes Gossner, an evangelical of no denomination, whose aim was simply to spread the Gospel. In practice, this usually meant that his missionaries became attached to other organisations, such as the London Missionary Society. In its first 100 years, the Gossner Mission sent out 23 missionaries to Australia, five to the Chatham Islands, four to Polynesia, and five to Dutch New Guinea. The four who went to Polynesia were: Ernst Krause, a doctor, who was with the LMS in the Society Islands and on Rarotonga from 1843-67; Leopold Mohn and Julius Hones, who spent five months with Krause at Bora Bora in the early 1850s and then went to Rurutu for a few months; and Wilhelm Schmidt who took up service with the LMS on Savai'i in 1847 and remained with them until 1857. Even before he sent his first missionaries to the Pacific Gossner had been interested in it and published a lot of apparently second-hand material on Pacific missions, presumably 'lifted' from LMS and Methodist publications and translated.

The first 24 volumes of <I>Die Biene auf dem missionsfelde</I>. After Gossner's missionaries reached the Pacific, the magazine began to publish much first-hand material.