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Title: The Bee-Master of Warrilow
Author: Edwardes, Tickner
Language: English
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THE BEE-MASTER
OF WARRILOW
BY
TICKNER EDWARDES
FELLOW OF THE ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON
AUTHOR OF “THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE”
* * * * *
THIRD EDITION
* * * * *
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
* * * * *
_First Published_ _1907_
_Second Edition (Methuen & Co. Ltd.) Revised and _1920_
Enlarged_
_Third Edition_ _1921_
* * * * *
_These Essays are reprinted by the courtesy of the Proprietor of_ “_The
Pall Mall Gazette_.”
DEDICATION
TO THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW’S
OLDEST AND STAUNCHEST FRIEND,
T. W. LITTLETON HAY
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
BY THE WRITER
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION
THE original “BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW”—that queer little honey-coloured
book of far-off days—contained but eleven chapters: in its present
edition the book has grown to more than three times its former length,
and constitutes practically a new volume.
To those who knew and loved the old “BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW,” no apology
for the additional chapters will be required, because it is directly to
the solicitation of many of them that this larger collection of essays on
English bee-garden life owes its appearance. And equally, to those who
will make the old bee-man’s acquaintance for the first time in these
present pages, little need be said. In spite of the War, the honey-bee
remains the same mysterious, fascinating creature that she has ever been;
and the men who live by the fruit of her toil share with her the like
changeless quality. The Master of Warrilow and his bees can very well be
left to win their own way into the hearts of new readers as they did with
the old.
T. E.
THE RED COTTAGE,
BURPHAM, ARUNDEL,
SUSSEX.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE 7
INTRODUCTION 13
I. THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 17
II. FEBRUARY AMONGST THE HIVES 24
III. A TWENTIETH CENTURY BEE-FARMER 31
IV. CHLOE AMONG THE BEES 37
V. A BEE-MAN OF THE ’FORTIES 44
VI. HEREDITY IN THE BEE-GARDEN 52
VII. NIGHT ON A HONEY-FARM 59
VIII. IN A BEE-CAMP 65
IX. THE BEE-HUNTERS 73
X. THE PHYSICIAN IN THE HIVE 80
XI. WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-FARM 86
XII. THE QUEEN BEE: IN ROMANCE AND REALITY 93
XIII. THE SONG OF THE HIVES 100
XIV. CONCERNING HONEY 107
XV. IN THE ABBOT’S BEE-GARDEN 113
XVI. BEES AND THEIR MASTERS 120
XVII. THE HONEY THIEVES 126
XVIII. THE STORY OF THE SWARM 132
XIX. THE MIND IN THE HIVE 139
XX. THE KING’S BEE-MASTER 145
XXI. POLLEN AND THE BEE 152
XXII. THE HONEY-FLOW 158
XXIII. SUMMER LIFE IN A BEE-HIVE 164
XXIV. THE YELLOW PERIL IN HIVELAND 170
XXV. THE UNBUSY BEE 176
XXVI. THE LONG NIGHT IN THE HIVE 182
XXVII. THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN 189
XXVIII. HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW 196
XXIX. THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY 202
XXX. THE BEE-BURNERS 209
XXXI. EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE 214
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A CORNER IN THE BEE-GARDEN 4
BROOD-COMB, SHOWING TWO SIZES OF CELL 24
THE BEE-MASTER’S COTTAGE 46
THE WAX MAKERS 60
HARD TIMES FOR THE BEES 86
HONEY-COMB: ITS VARIOUS STAGES 108
HIVING A SWARM 134
1. UPWARD-BUILT COMB 152
2. UPWARD-BUILT COMB 160
THE GUARDIAN OF THE HIVES 176
A NATURAL HONEY-BEE’S NEST 192
OLD COTTAGE-RUIN, WITH RECESSES FOR HIVES 214
INTRODUCTION
AMONG the beautiful things of the countryside, which are slowly but
surely passing away, must be reckoned the old Bee Gardens—fragrant, sunny
nooks of blossom, where the bees are housed only in the ancient straw
skeps, and have their own way in everything, the work of the bee-keeper
being little more than a placid looking-on at events of which it would
have been heresy to doubt the finite perfection.
To say, however, that modern ideas of progress in bee-farming must
inevitably rob the pursuit of all its old-world poetry and
picturesqueness, would be to represent the case in an unnecessarily bad
light. The latter-day beehive, it is true, has little more æsthetic
value than a Brighton bathing-machine; and the new class of bee-keepers,
which is springing up all over the country, is composed mainly of people
who have taken to the calling as they would to any other lucrative
business, having, for the most part, nothing but a good-humoured contempt
alike for the old-fashioned bee-keeper and the ancient traditions and
superstitions of his craft.
Nor can the inveterate, old-time skeppist himself—the man who obstinately
shuts his eyes to all that is good and true in modern bee-science—be
counted on to help in the preservation of the beautiful old gardens, or
in keeping alive customs which have been handed down from generation to
generation, almost unaltered, for literally thousands of years. Here and
there, in the remoter parts of the country, men can still be found who
keep their bees much in the same way as bees were kept in the time of
Columella or Virgil; and are content with as little profit. But these
form a rapidly diminishing class. The advantages of modern methods are
too overwhelmingly apparent. The old school must choose between the
adoption of latter-day systems, or suffer the only alternative—that of
total extinction at no very distant date.
Luckily for English bee-keeping, there is a third class upon which the
hopes of all who love the ancient ways and days, and yet recognise the
absorbing interest and value of modern research in apiarian science, may
legitimately rely. Born and bred amongst the hives, and steeped from
their earliest years in the lore of their skeppist forefathers, these
interesting folk seem, nevertheless, imbued to the core with the very
spirit of progress. While retaining an unlimited affection for all the
quaint old methods in bee-keeping, they maintain themselves,
unostentatiously, but very thoroughly, abreast of the times. Nothing new
is talked of in the world of bees that these people do not make trial of,
and quietly adopt into their daily practice, if really serviceable; or as
quietly discard, if the contrivance prove to have little else than
novelty to recommend it.
As a rule, they are reserved, silent men, difficult of approach; and yet,
when once on terms of familiarity, they make the most charming of
companions. Then they are ever ready to talk about their bees, or
discuss the latest improvements in apiculture; to explain the intricacies
of bee-life, as revealed by the foremost modern observers, or to dilate
by the hour on the astounding delusions of mediæval times. But they all
seem to possess one invariable characteristic—that of whole-hearted
reverence for the customs of their immediate ancestors, their own fathers
and grandfathers. In a long acquaintance with bee-men of this class, I
have never yet met with one who could be trapped into any decided
admission of defect in the old methods, which—to say truth—were often as
senseless as they were futile, even when not directly contrary to the
interest of the bee-owner, or the plain, obvious dictates of humanity.
In this they form a refreshing contrast to the ultra-modern, pushing
young apiculturist of to-day; and it is as a type of this class that the
Bee-Master of Warrilow is presented to the reader.
CHAPTER I
THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW
LONG, lithe, and sinewy, with three score years of sunburn on his keen,
gnarled face, and the sure stride of a mountain goat, the Bee-Master of
Warrilow struck you at once as a notable figure in any company.
Warrilow is a little precipitous village tucked away under the green
brink of the Sussex Downs; and the bee-farm lay on the southern slope of
the hill, with a sheltering barrier of pine above, in which, all day
long, the winter wind kept up an impotent complaining. But below, among
the hives, nothing stirred in the frosty, sun-riddled air. Now and again
a solitary worker-bee darted up from a hive door, took a brisk turn or
two in the dazzling light, then hurried home again to the warm cluster.
But the flash and quiver of wings, and the drowsy song of summer days,
were gone in the iron-bound January weather; and the bee-master was
lounging idly to and fro in the great main-way of the waxen city,
shot-gun under arm, and with apparently nothing more to do than to
meditate over past achievements, or to plan out operations for the season
to come.
As I approached, the sharp report of the gun rang out, and a little cloud
of birds went chippering fearsomely away over the hedgerow. The old man
watched them as they flew off dark against the snowy hillside. He threw
out the cartridge-cases disgustedly.
“Blue-tits!” said he. “They are the great pest of the bee-keeper in
winter time. When the snow covers the ground, and the frost has driven
all insect-life deep into the crevices of the trees, all the blue-caps
for miles round trek to the bee-gardens. Of course, if the bees would
only keep indoors they would be safe enough. But the same cause that
drives the birds in lures the bees out. The snow reflects the sunlight
up through the hive-entrances, and they think the bright days of spring
have come, and out they flock to their death. And winter is just the
time when every single bee is valuable. In summer a few hundreds more or
less make little difference, when in every hive young bees are maturing
at the rate of several thousands a day to take the place of those that
perish. But now every bee captured by the tits is an appreciable loss to
the colony. They are all nurse-bees in the winter-hives, and on them
depends the safe hatching-out of the first broods in the spring season.
So the bee-keeper would do well to include a shot-gun among his
paraphernalia, unless he is willing to feed all the starving tits of the
countryside at the risk of his year’s harvest.”
“But the blue-cap,” he went on, “is not always content to wait for his
breakfast until the bees voluntarily bring it to him. He has a trick of
enticing them out of the hive which is often successful even in the
coldest weather. Come into the extracting-house yonder, and I may be
able to show you what I mean.”
He led the way to a row of outbuildings which flanked the northern
boundary of the garden and formed additional shelter from the blustering
gale. A window of the extracting-house overlooked the whole extent of
hives. Opening this from within with as little noise as possible, the
bee-master put a strong field-glass into my hand.
“Now that we are out of sight,” he said, “the tits will soon be back
again. There they come—whole families of them together! Now watch that
green hive over there under the apple-tree.”
Looking through the glass, I saw that about a dozen tits had settled in
the tree. Their bright plumage contrasted vividly with the sober green
and grey of the lichened boughs, as they swung themselves to and fro in
the sunshine. But presently the boldest of them gave up this pretence of
searching for food among the branches, and hopped down upon the
alighting-board of the hive. At once two or three others followed him;
and then began an ingenious piece of business. The little company fell
to pecking at the hard wood with their bills, striking out a sharp
ringing tattoo plainly audible even where we lay hidden. The old bee-man
snorted contemptuously, and the cartridges slid home into the breech of
his gun with a vicious snap.
“Now keep an eye on the hive-entrance,” he said grimly.
The glass was a good one. Now I could plainly make out a movement in
this direction. The noise and vibration made by the birds outside had
roused the slumbering colony to a sense of danger. About a dozen bees
ran out to see what it all meant, and were immediately pounced upon. And
then the gun spoke over my head. It was a shot into the air, but it
served its harmless purpose. From every bush and tree there came over to
us a dull whirr of wings like far-off thunder, as the blue marauders sped
away for the open country, filling the air with their frightened jingling
note.
Perhaps of all cosy retreats from the winter blast it has ever been my
good fortune to discover, the extracting-room on Warrilow bee-farm was
the brightest and most comfortable. In summer-time the whole life of the
apiary centred here; and the stress and bustle, inevitable during the
season of the great honey-flow, obscured its manifold possibilities. But
in winter the extracting-machines were, for the most part, silent; and
the natural serenity and cosiness of the place reasserted themselves
triumphantly. From the open furnace-door a ruddy warmth and glow
enriched every nook and corner of the long building. The walls were
lined with shelves where the polished tin vessels, in which the surplus
honey was stored, gave back the fire-shine in a hundred flickering points
of amber light. The work of hive-making in the neighbouring sheds was
going briskly forward, but the noise of hammering, the shrill hum of
sawing and planing machinery, and the intermittent cough of the
oil-engine reached us only as a subdued, tranquil murmur—the very voice
of rest.
The bee-master closed the window behind its thick bee-proof curtains,
and, putting his gun away in a corner, drew a comfortable high-backed
settle near to the cheery blaze. Then he disappeared for a moment, and
returned with a dusty cobweb-shrouded bottle, which he carried in a
wicker cradle as a butler would bear priceless old wine. The cork came
out with a ringing jubilant report, and the pale, straw-coloured liquid
foamed into the glasses like champagne. It stilled at once, leaving the
whole inner surface of the glass veneered with golden bells. The old
bee-man held it up critically against the light.
“The last of 19–,” he said, regretfully. “The finest mead year in this
part of the country for many a decade back. Most people have never
tasted the old Anglo-Saxon drink that King Alfred loved, and probably
Harold’s men made merry with on the eve of Hastings. So they can’t be
expected to know that metheglin varies with each season as much as wine
from the grape.”
Of the goodness of the liquor there admitted no question. It had the
bouquet of a ripe Ribston pippin, and the potency of East Indian sherry
thrice round the Horn. But its flavour entirely eluded all attempt at
comparison. There was a suggestive note of fine old perry about it, and
a dim reminder of certain almost colourless Rhenish wines, never
imported, and only to be encountered in moments of rare and happy chance.
Yet neither of these parallels came within a sunbeam’s length of the
truth about this immaculate honey-vintage of Warrilow. Pondering over
the liquor thus, the thought came to me that nothing less than a supreme
occasion could have warranted its production to-day. And this conjecture
was immediately verified. The bee-master raised his glass above his
head.
“To the Bees of Warrilow!” he said, lapsing into the broad Sussex
dialect, as he always did when much moved by his theme. “Forty-one years
ago to-day the first stock I ever owned was fixed up out there under the
old codlin-tree; and now there are two hundred and twenty of them. ’Twas
before you were born, likely as not; and bee science has seen many
changes since then. In those days there were nothing but the old straw
skeps, and most bee-keepers knew as little about the inner life of their
bees as we do of the bottom of the South Pacific. Now things are very
different; but the improvement is mostly in the bee-keepers themselves.
The bees are exactly as they always have been, and work on the same
principles as they did in the time of Solomon. They go their appointed
way inexorably, and all the bee-master can do is to run on ahead and
smooth the path a little for them. Indeed, after forty odd years of
bee-keeping, I doubt if the bees even realise that they are ‘kept’ at
all. The bee-master’s work has little more to do with their progress
than the organ-blower’s with the tune.”
“Can you,” I asked him, as we parted, “after all these years of
experience, lay down for beginners in beemanship one royal maxim of
success above any other?”
He thought it over a little, the gun on his shoulder again.
“Well, they might take warning from this same King Solomon,” he said,
“and beware the foreign feminine element. Let British bee-keepers cease
to import queen bees from Italy and elsewhere, and stick to the good old
English Black. All my bees are of this strain, and mostly from one pure
original Sussex stock. The English black bee is a more generous
honey-maker in indifferent seasons; she does not swarm so determinedly,
under proper treatment, as the Ligurians or Carniolans; and, above all,
though she is not so handsome as some of her Continental rivals, she
comes of a hardy northern race, and stands the ups and downs of the
British winter better than any of the fantastic yellow-girdled crew from
overseas.”
CHAPTER II
FEBRUARY AMONGST THE HIVES
THE midday sun shone warm from a cloudless sky. Up in the highest
elm-tops the south-west wind kept the chattering starlings gently
swinging, but below in the bee-garden scarce a breath moved under the
rich soft light.
As I lifted the latch of the garden-gate, the sharp click brought a
stooping figure erect in the midst of the hives; and the bee-master came
down the red-tiled winding path to meet me. He carried a box full of
some yellowish powdery substance in one hand, and a big pitcher of water
in the other; and as usual, his shirt-sleeves were tucked up to the
shoulder, baring his weather-browned arms to the morning sun.
“When do we begin the year’s bee-work?” he said, repeating my question
amusedly. “Why, we began on New Year’s morning. And last year’s work
was finished on Old Year’s night. If you go with the times, every day in
the year has its work on a modern bee-farm, either indoors or out.”
[Picture: “Brood-comb: showing two sizes of cell being made side by
side”]
“But it is on these first warm days of spring,” he continued, as I
followed him into the thick of the hives, “that outdoor work for the
bee-man starts in earnest. The bees began long ago. January was not out
before the first few eggs were laid right in the centre of the
brood-combs. And from now on, if only we manage properly, each
bee-colony will go on increasing until, in the height of the season,
every queen will be laying from two thousand to three thousand eggs a
day.”
He stopped and set down his box and his pitcher.
“If we manage properly. But there’s the rub. Success in bee-keeping is
all a question of numbers. The more worker-bees there are when the
honey-flow begins, the greater will be the honey-harvest. The whole art
of the bee-keeper consists in maintaining a steady increase in population
from the first moment the queens begin to lay in January, until the end
of May brings on the rush of the white clover, and every bee goes mad
with work from morning to night. Of course, in countries where the
climate is reasonable, and the year may be counted on to warm up steadily
month by month, all this is fairly easy; but with topsy-turvy weather,
such as we get in England, it is a vastly different matter. Just listen
to the bees now! And this is only February!’”
A deep vibrating murmur was upon the air. It came from all sides of us;
it rose from under foot, where the crocuses were blooming; it seemed to
fill the blue sky above with an ocean of sweet sound. The sunlight was
alive with scintillating points of light, like cast handfuls of diamonds,
as the bees darted hither and thither, or hovered in little joyous
companies round every hive. They swept to and fro between us; gambolled
about our heads; came with a sudden shrill menacing note and scrutinised
our mouths, our ears, our eyes, or settled on our hands and faces,
comfortably, and with no apparent haste to be gone. The bee-master noted
my growing uneasiness, not to say trepidation.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “It is only their companionableness. They
won’t sting—at least, not if you give them their way. But now come and
see what we are doing to help on the queens in their work.”
At different stations in the garden I had noticed some shallow wooden
trays standing among the hives. The old bee-man led the way to one of
these. Here the humming was louder and busier than ever. The tray was
full of fine wood-shavings, dusted over with the yellow powder from the
bee-master’s box; and scores of bees were at work in it, smothering
themselves from head to foot, and flying off like golden millers to the
hives.
“This is pea-flour,” explained the master, “and it takes the place of
pollen as food for the young bees, until the spring flowers open and the
natural supply is available. This forms the first step in the
bee-keeper’s work of patching up the defective English climate. From the
beginning our policy is to deceive the queens into the belief that all is
prosperity and progress outside. We keep all the hives well covered up,
and contract the entrances, so that a high temperature is maintained
within, and the queens imagine summer is already advancing. Then they
see the pea-flour coming in plentifully, and conclude that the fields and
hillsides are covered with flowers; for they never come out of the hives
except at swarming-time, and must judge of the year by what they see
around them. Then in a week or two we shall put the spring-feeders on,
and give each hive as much syrup as the bees can take down; and this,
again, leads the queens into the belief that the year’s food-supply has
begun in earnest. The result is that the winter lethargy in the hive is
soon completely overthrown, the queens begin to lay unrestrictedly, and
the whole colony is forging on towards summer strength long before there
is any natural reason for it.”
We were stooping down, watching the bees at the nearest hive. A little
cloud of them was hovering in the sunshine, heads towards the entrance,
keeping up a shrill jovial contented note as they flew. Others were
roving round with a vagrant, workless air, singing a low desultory song
as they trifled about among the crocuses, passing from gleaming white to
rich purple, then to gold, and back again to white, just as the mood took
them. In the hive itself there was evidently a kind of spring-cleaning
well in progress. Hundreds of the bees were bringing out minute
sand-coloured particles, which accumulated on the alighting-board visibly
as we watched. Now and again a worker came backing out, dragging a dead
bee laboriously after her. Instantly two or three others rushed to help
in the task, and between them they tumbled the carcass over the edge of
the footboard down among the grass below. Sometimes the burden was of a
pure white colour, like the ghost of a bee, perfect in shape, with beady
black eyes, and its colourless wings folded round it like a cerecloth.
Then it seemed to be less weighty, and its carrier usually shouldered the
gruesome thing, and flew away with it high up into the sunshine, and
swiftly out of view.
“Those are the undertakers,” said the bee-master, ruminatively filling a
pipe. “Their work is to carry the dead out of the hive. That last was
one of the New Year’s brood, and they often die in the cell like that,
especially at the beginning of the season. All that fine drift is the
cell-cappings thrown down during the winter from time to time as the
stores were broached, and every warm day sees them cleaning up the hive
in this way. And now watch these others—these that are coming and going
straight in and out of the hive.”
I followed the pointing pipe-stem. The alighting-stage was covered with
a throng of bees, each busily intent on some particular task. But every
now and then a bee emerged from the hive with a rush, elbowed her way
excitedly through the crowd, and darted straight off into the sunshine
without an instant’s pause. In the same way others were returning, and
as swiftly disappearing into the hive.
“Those are the water-carriers,” explained the master. “Water is a
constant need in bee-life almost the whole year round. It is used to
soften the mixture of honey and pollen with which the young grubs and
newly-hatched bees are fed; and the old bees require a lot of it to
dilute their winter stores. The river is the traditional watering-place
for my bees here, and in the summer it serves very well; but in the
winter hundreds are lost either through cold or drowning. And so at this
time we give them a water-supply close at home.”
He took up his pitcher, and led the way to the other end of the garden.
Here, on a bench, he showed me a long row of glass jars full of water,
standing mouth downward, each on its separate plate of blue china. The
water was oozing out round the edges of the jars, and scores of the bees
were drinking at it side by side, like cattle at a trough.
“We give it them lukewarm,” said the old bee-man, “and always mix salt
with it. If we had sea-water here, nothing would be better; seaside bees
often go down to the shore to drink, as you may prove for yourself on any
fine day in summer. Why are all the plates blue? Bees are as fanciful
in their ways as our own women-folk, and in nothing more than on the
question of colour. Just this particular shade of light blue seems to
attract them more than any other. Next to that, pure white is a
favourite with them; but they have a pronounced dislike to anything
brilliantly red, as all the old writers about bees noticed hundreds of
years ago. If I were to put some of the drinking-jars on bright red
saucers now, you would not see half as many bees on them as on the pale
blue.”
We moved on to the extracting-house, whence the master now fetched his
smoker, and a curious knife, with a broad and very keen-looking blade.
He packed the tin nozzle of the smoker with rolled brown paper, lighted
it, and, by means of the little bellows underneath, soon blew it up into
full strength. Then he went to one of the quietest hives, where only a
few bees were wandering aimlessly about, and sent a dense stream of smoke
into the entrance. A moment later he had taken the roof and coverings
off, and was lifting out the central comb-frames one by one, with the
bees clinging in thousands all about them.
“Now,” he said, “we have come to what is really the most important
operation of all in the bee-keeper’s work of stimulating his stocks for
the coming season. Here in the centre of each comb you see the young
brood; but all the cells above and around it are full of honey, still
sealed over and untouched by the bees. The stock is behind time. The
queen must be roused at once to her responsibilities, and here is one
very simple and effective way of doing it.”
He took the knife, deftly shaved off the cappings from the honey-cells of
each comb, and as quickly returned the frames, dripping with honey, to
the brood-nest. In a few seconds the hive was comfortably packed down
again, and he was looking round for the next languid stock.
“All these slow, backward colonies,” said the bee-master, as he puffed
away with his smoker, “will have to be treated after the same fashion.
The work must be smartly done, or you will chill the brood; but, in
uncapping the stores like this, right in the centre of the brood-nest,
the effect on the stock is magical. The whole hive reeks with the smell
of honey, and such evidence of prosperity is irresistible. To-morrow, if
you come this way, you will see all these timorous bee-folk as busy as
any in the garden.”
CHAPTER III
A TWENTIETH CENTURY BEE-FARMER
IT was sunny spring in the bee-garden. The thick elder-hedge to the
north was full of young green leaf; everywhere the trim footways between
the hives were marked by yellow bands of crocus-bloom, and daffodils just
showing a golden promise of what they would be in a few warm days to
come. From a distance I had caught the fresh spring song of the hives,
and had seen the bee-master and his men at work in different quarters of
the mimic city. But now, drawing nearer, I observed they were intent on
what seemed to me a perfectly astounding enterprise. Each man held a
spoon in one hand and a bowl of what I now knew to be pea-flour in the
other, and I saw that they were busily engaged in filling the
crocus-blossoms up to the brim with this inestimable condiment. My
friend the bee-master looked up on my approach, and, as was his wont,
forestalled the inevitable questioning.
“This is another way of giving it,” he explained, “and the best of all in
the earliest part of the season. Instinct leads the bees to the flowers
for pollen-food when they will not look for it elsewhere; and as the
natural supply is very meagre, we just help them in this way.”
As he spoke I became rather unpleasantly aware of a change of manners on
the part of his winged people. First one and then another came harping
round, and, settling comfortably on my face, showed no inclination to
move again. In my ignorance I was for brushing them off, but the
bee-master came hurriedly to my rescue. He dislodged them with a few
gentle puffs from his tobacco-pipe.
“That is always their way in the spring-time,” he explained. “The warmth
of the skin attracts them, and the best thing to do is to take no notice.
If you had knocked them off you would probably have been stung.”
“Is it true that a bee can only sting once?” I asked him, as he bent
again over the crocus beds.
He laughed.
“What would be the good of a sword to a soldier,” he said, “if only one
blow could be struck with it? It is certainly true that the bee does not
usually sting a second time, but that is only because you are too hasty
with her. You brush her off before she has had time to complete her
business, and the barbed sting, holding in the wound, is torn away, and
the bee dies. But now watch how the thing works naturally.”
A bee had settled on his hand as he was speaking. He closed his fingers
gently over it, and forced it to sting.
“Now,” he continued, quite unconcernedly, “look what really happens. The
bee makes two or three lunges before she gets the sting fairly home.
Then the poison is injected. Now watch what she does afterwards. See!
she has finished her work, and is turning round and round! The barbs are
arranged spirally on the sting, and she is twisting it out
corkscrew-fashion. Now she is free again! there she goes, you see,
weapon and all; and ready to sting again if necessary.”
The crocus-filling operation was over now, and the bee-master took up his
barrow and led the way to a row of hives in the sunniest part of the
garden. He pulled up before the first of the hives, and lighted his
smoking apparatus.
“These,” he said, as he fell to work, “have not been opened since
October, and it is high time we saw how things are going with them.”
He drove a few strong puffs of smoke into the entrance of the hive and
removed the lid. Three or four thicknesses of warm woollen quilting lay
beneath. Under these a square of linen covered the tops of the frames,
to which it had been firmly propolised by the bees. My friend began to
peel this carefully off, beginning at one corner and using the smoker
freely as the linen ripped away.
“This was a full-weight hive in the autumn,” he said, “so there was no
need for candy-feeding. But they most be pretty near the end of their
stores now. You see how they are all together on the three or four
frames in the centre of the hive? The other combs are quite empty and
deserted. And look how near they are clustering to the top of the bars!
Bees always feed upwards, and that means we must begin spring-feeding
right away.”
He turned to the barrow, on which was a large box, lined with warm
material, and containing bar frames full of sealed honeycomb.
“These are extra combs from last summer. I keep them in a warm cupboard
over the stove at about the same temperature as the hive we are going to
put them into. But first they must be uncapped. Have you ever seen the
Bingham used?”
From the inexhaustible barrow he produced the long knife with the broad,
flat blade; and, poising the frame of honeycomb vertically on his knee,
he removed the sheet of cell-caps with one dexterous cut, laying the
honey bare from end to end. This frame was then lowered into the hive
with the uncapped side close against the clustering bees. Another comb,
similarly treated, was placed on the opposite flank of the cluster.
Outside each of these a second full comb was as swiftly brought into
position. Then the sliding inner walls of the brood-nest were pushed up
close to the frame, and the quilts and roof restored. The whole seemed
the work of a few moments at the outside.
“All this early spring work,” said the bee-master, as we moved to the
next hive, “is based upon the recognition of one thing. In the south
here the real great honey-flow comes all at once: very often the main
honey-harvest for the year has to be won or lost during three short weeks
of summer. The bees know this, and from the first days of spring they
have only the one idea—to create an immense population, so that when the
honey-flow begins there may be no lack of harvesters. But against this
main idea there is another one—their ingrained and invincible caution.
Not an egg will be laid nor a grub hatched unless there is reasonable
chance of subsistence for it. The populace of the hive must be increased
only in proportion to the amount of stores coming in. With a good
spring, and the early honey plentiful, the queen will increase her
production of eggs with every day, and the population of the hive will
advance accordingly. But if, on the very brink of the great honey-flow,
there comes, as is so often the case, a spell of cold windy weather,
laying is stopped at once; and, if the cold continues, all hatching grubs
are destroyed and the garrison put on half-rations. And so the work of
months is undone.”
He stooped to bring his friendly pipe to my succour again, for a bee was
trying to get down my collar in the most unnerving way, and another had
apparently mistaken my mouth for the front-door of his hive. The
intruders happily driven off, the master went back to his work and his
talk together.
“But it is just here that the art of the bee-keeper comes in. He must
prevent this interruption to progress by maintaining the confidence of
the bees in the season. He must create an artificial plenty until the
real prosperity begins. Yet, after all, he must never lose sight of the
main principle, of carrying out the ideas of the bees, not his own. In
good beemanship there is only one road to success: you must study to find
out what the bees intend to do, and then help them to do it. They call
us bee-masters, but bee-servants would be much the better name. The bees
have their definite plan of life, perfected through countless ages, and
nothing you can do will ever turn them from it. You can delay their
work, or you can even thwart it altogether, but no one has ever succeeded
in changing a single principle in bee-life. And so the best bee-master
is always the one who most exactly obeys the orders from the hive.”
CHAPTER IV
CHLOE AMONG THE BEES
THE bee-mistress looked at my card, then put its owner under a like
careful scrutiny. In the shady garden where we stood, the sunlight fell
in quivering golden splashes round our feet. High overhead, in the
purple elm-blossom, the bees and the glad March wind made rival music.
Higher still a ripple of lark-song hung in the blue, and a score of rooks
were sailing by, filling the morning with their rich, deep clamour of
unrest.
The bee-mistress drew off her sting-proof gloves in thoughtful
deliberation.
“If I show you the bee-farm,” said she, eyeing me somewhat doubtfully,
“and let you see what women have done and are doing in an ideal feminine
industry, will you promise to write of us with seriousness? I mean, will
you undertake to deal with the matter for what it is—a plain, business
enterprise by business people—and not treat it flippantly, just because
no masculine creature has had a hand in it?”
“This is an attempt,” she went on—the needful assurances having been
given—“an attempt, and, we believe, a real solution to a very real
difficulty. There are thousands of educated women in the towns who have
to earn their own bread; and they do it usually by trying to compete with
men in walks of life for which they are wholly unsuited. Now, why do
they not come out into the pure air and quiet of the countryside, and
take up any one of several pursuits open there to a refined, well-bred
woman? Everywhere the labourers are forsaking the land and crowding into
the cities. That is a farmers’ problem, with which, of course, women
have nothing to do. The rough, heavy work in the cornfields must always
be done either by men or machinery. But there are certain employments,
even in the country, that women can invariably undertake better than men,
and bee-keeping is one of them. The work is light. It needs just that
delicacy and deftness of touch that only a woman can bring to it. It is
profitable. Above all, there is nothing about it, from first to last, of
an objectionable character, demanding masculine interference. In
poultry-farming, good as it is for women, there must always be a
stony-hearted man about the place to do unnameable necessary things in a
fluffy back-shed. But bee-keeping is clean, clever, humanising, open-air
work—essentially women’s work all through.”
She had led the way through the scented old-fashioned garden, towards a
gate in the farther wall, talking as she went. Now she paused, with her
hand on the latch.
“This,” she said, “we call the Transition Gate. It divides our work from
our play. On this side of it we have the tennis-court and the croquet,
and other games that women love, young or old. But it is all serious
business on the other side. And now you shall see our latter-day Eden,
with its one unimportant omission.”
As the door swung back to her touch, the murmur that was upon the air
grew suddenly in force and volume. Looking through, I saw an old
orchard, spacious, sun-riddled, carpeted with green; and, stretching away
under the ancient apple-boughs, long, neat rows of hives, a hundred or
more, all alive with bees, winnowing the March sunshine with their myriad
wings.
Here and there in the shade-dappled pleasance figures were moving about,
busily at work among the hives, figures of women clad in trim holland
blouses, and wearing bee-veils, through which only a dim guess at the
face beneath could be hazarded. Laughter and talk went to and fro in the
sun-steeped quiet of the place; and one of the fair bee-gardeners near at
hand—young and pretty, I could have sworn, although her blue gauze veil
disclosed provokingly little—was singing to herself, as she stooped over
an open hive, and lifted the crowded brood-frames one by one up into the
light of day.
“The great work of the year is just beginning with us,” explained the
bee-mistress. “In these first warm days of spring every hive must be
opened and its condition ascertained. Those that are short of stores
must be fed; backward colonies must be quickened to a sense of their
responsibilities. Clean hives must be substituted for the old,
winter-soiled dwellings. Queens that are past their prime will have to
be dethroned, and their places filled by younger and more vigorous
successors. But it is all typically women’s work. You have an old
acquaintance with the lordly bee-master and his ways; now come and see
how a woman manages.”
We passed over to the singing lady in the veil, and—from a safe
distance—watched her at her work. Each frame, as it was raised out of
the seething abyss of the hive, was turned upside down and carefully
examined. A little vortex of bees swung round her head, shrilling
vindictively. Those on the uplifted comb-frames hustled to and fro like
frightened sheep, or crammed themselves head foremost into the empty
cells, out of reach of the disturbing light.
“That is a queenless stock,” said the bee-mistress. “It is going to be
united with another colony, where there is a young, high-mettled ruler in
want of subjects.”
We watched the bee-gardener as she went to one of the neighbouring hives,
subdued and opened it, drew out all the brood-combs, and brought them
over in a carrying-rack, with the bees clustering in thousands all about
them. Then a scent-diffuser was brought into play, and the fragrance of
lavender-water came over to us, as the combs of both hives were quickly
sprayed with the perfume, then lowered into the hive, a frame from each
stock alternately. It was the old time-honoured plan for uniting
bee-colonies, by impregnating them with the same odour, and so inducing
the bees to live together peaceably, where otherwise a deadly war might
ensue. But the whole operation was carried through with a neat celerity,
and light, dexterous handling, I had never seen equalled by any man.
“That girl,” said the bee-mistress, as we moved away, “came to me out of
a London office a year ago, anæmic, pale as the paper she typed on all
day for a living. Now she is well and strong, and almost as brown as the
bees she works among so willingly. All my girls here have come to me
from time to time in the same way out of the towns, forsaking indoor
employment that was surely stunting all growth of mind and body. And
there are thousands who would do the same to-morrow, if only the chance
could be given them.”
We stopped in the centre of the old orchard. Overhead the swelling
fruit-buds glistened against the blue sky. Merry thrush-music rang out
far and near. Sun and shadow, the song of the bees, laughing voices, a
snatch of an old Sussex chantie, the perfume of violet-beds and nodding
gillyflowers, all came over to us through the lichened tree-stems, in a
flood of delicious colour and scent and sound. The bee-mistress turned
to me, triumphantly.
“Would any sane woman,” she asked, “stop in the din and dirt of a smoky
city, if she could come and work in a place like this? Bee-keeping for
women! do you not see what a chance it opens up to poor toiling folk,
pining for fresh air and sunshine, especially to the office-girl class,
girls often of birth and refinement—just that kind of poor gentlewomen
whose breeding and social station render them most difficult of all to
help? And here is work for them, clean, intellectual, profitable; work
that will keep them all day long in the open air; a healthy, happy
country life, humanly within the reach of all.”
“What is wanted,” continued the bee-mistress, as we went slowly down the
broad main-way of the honey-farm, “is for some great lady, rich in
business ideas as well as in pocket, to take up the whole scheme, and to
start a network of small bee-gardens for women over the whole land. Very
large bee-farms are a mistake, I think, except in the most favourable
districts. Bees work only within a radius of two or three miles at most,
so that the number of hives that can be kept profitably in a given area
has its definite limits. But there is still plenty of room everywhere
for bee-farms of moderate size, conducted on the right principles; and
there is no reason at all why they should not work together on the
co-operative plan, sending all their produce to some convenient centre in
each district, to be prepared and marketed for the common good.”
“But the whole outcome,” she went on, “of a scheme like this depends on
the business qualities imported into it. Here, in the heart of the
Sussex Weald, we labour together in the midst of almost ideal
surroundings, but we never lose sight of the plain, commercial aspect of
the thing. We study all the latest writings on our subject, experiment
with all novelties, and keep ourselves well abreast of the times in every
way. Our system is to make each hive show a clear, definite profit. The
annual income is not, and can never be, a very large one, but we fare
quite simply, and have sufficient for our needs. In any case, however,
we have proved here that a few women, renting a small house and garden
out in the country, can live together comfortably on the proceeds from
their bees; and there is no reason in the world why the idea should not
be carried out by others with equal success.”
We had made the round of the whole busy, murmuring enclosure, and had
come again to the little door in the wall. Passing through and out once
more into the world of merely masculine endeavour, the bee-mistress gave
me a final word.
“You may think,” said she, “that what I advocate, though successful in
our own single instance, might prove impracticable on a widely extended
scale. Well, do you know that last year close upon three hundred and
fifty tons of honey were imported into Great Britain from foreign
sources, {43} just because our home apiculturists were unable to cope
with the national demand? And this being so, is it too much to think
that, if women would only band themselves together and take up
bee-keeping systematically, as we have done, all or most of that honey
could be produced—of infinitely better quality—here, on our own British
soil?”
CHAPTER V
A BEE-MAN OF THE ’FORTIES
THE old bee-garden lay on the verge of the wood. Seen from a distance it
looked like a great white china bowl brimming over with roses; but a
nearer view changed the porcelain to a snowy barrier of hawthorn, and the
roses became blossoming apple-boughs, stretching up into the May
sunshine, where all the bees in the world seemed to have forgathered,
filling the air with their rich wild chant.
Coming into the old garden from the glare of the dusty road, the hives
themselves were the last thing to rivet attention. As you went up the
shady moss-grown path, perhaps the first impression you became gratefully
conscious of was the slow dim quiet of the place—a quiet that had in it
all the essentials of silence, and yet was really made up of a myriad
blended sounds. Then the sheer carmine of the tulips, in the sunny vista
beyond the orchard, came upon you like a trumpet-note through the shadowy
aisles of the trees; and after this, in turn, the flaming amber of the
marigolds, broad zones of forget-me-nots like strips of the blue sky
fallen, snow-drifts of arabis and starwort, purple pansy-spangles veering
to every breeze. And last of all you became gradually aware that every
bright nook or shade-dappled corner round you had its nestling bee-skep,
half hidden in the general riot of blossom, yet marked by the steadier,
deeper song of the homing bees.
To stand here, in the midst of the hives, of a fine May morning, side by
side with the old bee-man, and watch with him for the earliest swarms of
the year, was an experience that took one back far into another and a
kindlier century. There were certain hives in the garden, grey with age
and smothered in moss and lichen, that were the traditional
mother-colonies of all the rest. The old bee-keeper treasured them as
relics of his sturdy manhood, just as he did the percussion fowling-piece
over his mantel; and pointed to one in particular as being close on
thirty years old. Nowadays remorseless science has proved that the
individual life of the honey-bee extends to four or five months at most;
but the old bee-keeper firmly believed that some at least of the original
members of this colony still flourished in green old age deep in the
sombre corridors of the ancient skep. Bending down, he would point out
to you, among the crowd on the alighting-board, certain bees with
polished thorax and ragged wings worn almost to a stump. While the young
worker-bees were charging in and out of the hive at breakneck speed,
these superannuated amazons doddered about in the sunlight, with an
obvious and pathetic assumption of importance. They were really the last
survivors of the bygone winter’s brood. Their task of hatching the new
spring generation was over; and now, the power of flight denied to them,
they busied themselves in the work of sentinels at the gate, or in
grooming the young bees as they came out for their first adventure into
the far world of blossoming clover under the hill.
For modern apiculture, with its interchangeable comb-frames and
section-supers, and American notions generally, the old bee-keeper
harboured a fine contempt. In its place he had an exhaustless store of
original bee-knowledge, gathered throughout his sixty odd years of placid
life among the bees. His were all old-fashioned hives of straw, hackled
and potsherded just as they must have been any time since Saxon Alfred
burned the cakes. Each bee-colony had its separate three-legged stool,
and each leg stood in an earthen pan of water, impassable moat for ants
and “wood-li’s,” and such small honey-thieves. Why the hives were thus
dotted about in such admired but inconvenient disorder was a puzzle at
first, until you learned more of ancient bee-traditions. Wherever a
swarm settled—up in the pink-rosetted apple-boughs, under the eaves of
the old thatched cottage, or deep in the tangle of the hawthorn
hedge—there, on the nearest open ground beneath, was its inalienable,
predetermined home. When, as sometimes happened, the swarm went straight
away out of sight over the meadows, or sailed off like a pirouetting grey
cloud over the roof of the wood, the old bee-keeper never sought to
reclaim it for the garden.
[Picture: “The Bee-Master’s cottage”]
“’Tis gone to the shires fer change o’ air,” he would say, shielding his
bleak blue eyes with his hand, as he gazed after it. “’Twould be agen
natur’ to hike ’em back here along. An’ naught but ill-luck an’ worry
wi’out end.”
He never observed the skies for tokens of to-morrow’s weather, as did his
neighbours of the countryside. The bees were his weather-glass and
thermometer in one. If they hived very early after noon, though the sun
went down in clear gold and the summer night loomed like molten amethyst
under the starshine, he would prophesy rain before morning. And sure
enough you were wakened at dawn by a furious patter on the window, and
the booming of the south-west wind in the pine-clad crest of the hill.
But if the bees loitered afield far into the gusty crimson gloaming, and
the loud darkness that followed seemed only to bring added intensity to
the busy labour-note within the hives, no matter how the wind keened or
the griddle of black storm-cloud threatened, he would go on with his
evening task of watering his garden, sure of a morrow of cloudless heat
to come.
He knew all the sources of honey for miles around; and, by taste and
smell, could decide at once the particular crop from which each sample
had been gathered. He would discriminate between that from white clover
or sainfoin; the produce of the yellow charlock wastes; or the
orchard-honey, wherein it seemed the fragrance of cherry-bloom was always
to be differentiated from that of apple or damson or pear. He would tell
you when good honey had been spoilt by the grosser flavour of sunflower
or horse-chestnut; or when the detestable honey-dew had entered into its
composition; or, the super-caps having been removed too late in the
season, the bees had got at the early ivy-blossom, and so degraded all
the batch.
Watching bees at work of a fair morning in May, nothing excites the
wonder of the casual looker-on more than the mysterious burdens they are
for ever bringing home upon their thighs; semi-globular packs, always
gaily coloured, and often so heavy and cumbersome that the bee can hardly
drag its weary way into the hive. This is pollen, to be stored in the
cells, and afterwards kneaded up with honey as food for the young bees.
The old man could say at once by the colour from which flower each load
was obtained. The deep brown-gold panniers came from the gorse-bloom;
the pure snow-white from the hawthorns; the vivid yellow, always so big
and seemingly so weighty, had been filled in the buttercup meads. Now
and again, in early spring, a bee would come blundering home with a load
of pallid sea-green hue. This came from the gooseberry bushes. And
later, in summer, when the poppies began to throw their scarlet shuttles
in the corn, many of these airy cargoes would be of a rich velvety black.
But there was one kind which the old bee-man had never yet succeeded in
tracing to its flowery origin. He saw it only rarely, perhaps not a
dozen times in the season—a wonderful deep rose-crimson, singling out its
bearer, on her passage through the throng, as with twin danger-lamps,
doubly bright in the morning glow.
Keeping watch over the comings and goings of his bees was always his
favourite pastime, year in and year out; but it was in the later weeks of
May that his interest in them culminated. He had always had swarms in
May as far back as his memory could serve him; and the oldest hive in the
garden was generally the first to swarm. As a rule the bees gave
sufficient warning of their intended migration some hours before their
actual issue. The strenuous pell-mell business of the hive would come to
a sudden portentous halt. While a few of the bees still darted straight
off into the sunshine on their wonted errands, or returned with the usual
motley loads upon their thighs, the rest of the colony seemed to have
abandoned work altogether. From early morning they hung in a great brown
cluster all over the face of the hive, and down almost to the earth
beneath; a churning mass of insect-life that grew bigger and bigger with
every moment, glistening like wet seaweed in the morning sun. In the
cluster itself there was an uncanny silence. But out of the depths of
the hive came a low vibrating murmur, wholly distinct from its usual
note; and every now and again a faint shrill piping sound could be heard,
as the old queen worked herself up to swarming frenzy, vainly seeking the
while to reach the royal nursery where the rival who was to oust her from
her old dominion was even then steadily gnawing through her constraining
prison walls.
At these momentous times a quaint ceremonial was rigidly adhered to by
the old bee-master. First he brought out a pitcher of home-brewed ale,
from which all who were to assist in the swarm-taking were required to
drink, as at a solemn rite. The dressing of the skep was his next care.
A little of the beer was sprinkled over its interior, and then it was
carefully scoured out with a handful of balm and lavender and mint.
After this the skep was covered up and set aside in the shade; and the
old bee-keeper, carrying an ancient battered copper bowl in one gnarled
hand, and a great door-key in the other, would lead the way towards the
hive, his drab smock-frock mowing the scarlet tulip-heads down as he
went.
Sometimes the swarm went off without any preliminary warning, just as if
the skep had burst like a bombshell, volleying its living contents into
the sky. But oftener it went through the several stages of a regular
process. After much waiting and many false alarms, a peculiar stir would
come in the throng of bees cumbering the entrance to the hive. Thousands
rose on the wing, until the sunshine overhead was charged with them as
with countless fluttering atoms of silver-foil; and a wild joyous song
spread far and wide, overpowering all other sounds in the garden. Within
the hive the rich bass note had ceased; and a hissing noise, like a great
caldron boiling over, took its place, as the bees inside came pouring out
to join the carolling multitude above. Last of all came the queen.
Watching for her through the glittering gauzy atmosphere of flashing
wings, she was always strangely conspicuous, with her long pointed body
of brilliant chestnut-red. She came hustling forth; stopped for an
instant to comb her antenna on the edge of the foot-board; then soared
straight up into the blue, the whole swarm crowding deliriously in her
train.
Immediately the old bee-man commenced a weird tom-tomming on his metal
bowl. “Ringing the bees” was an exact science with him. They were
supposed to fly higher or lower according to the measure of the music;
and now the great door-key beat out a slow, stately chime like a
cathedral bell. Whether this ringing of the old-time skeppists had any
real influence on the movements of a swarm has never been absolutely
determined; but there was no doubt in this case of the bee-keeper’s
perfect faith in the process, or that the bees would commence their
descent and settle, usually in one of the apple trees, very soon after
the din began.
The rapid growth of the swarm-cluster was always one of the most
bewildering things to watch. From a little dark knot no bigger than the
clenched hand, it swelled in a moment to the size of a half-gallon
measure, growing in girth and length with inconceivable swiftness, until
the branch began to droop under its weight. A minute more, and the last
of the flying bees had joined the cluster; the stout apple-branch was
bent almost double; and the completed swarm hung within a few inches of
the ground, a long cigar-shaped mass gently swaying to and fro in the
flickering light and shade.
The joyous trek-song of the bees, and the clanging melody of key and
basin, died down together. The old murmuring, songful quiet closed over
the garden again, as water over a cast stone. To hive a swarm thus
easily within reach was a simple matter. Soon the old bee-man had got
all snugly inside the skep, and the hive in its self-appointed station.
And already the bees were settling down to work; hovering merrily about
it, or packed in the fragrant darkness busy at comb-building, or lancing
off to the clover-fields, eager to begin the task of provisioning the new
home.
CHAPTER VI
HEREDITY IN THE BEE-GARDEN
WE were in the great high-road of Warrilow bee-farm, and had stopped
midway down in the heart of the waxen city. On every hand the hives
stretched away in long trim rows, and the hot June sunshine was alive
with darting bees and fragrant with the smell of new-made honey.
“Swarming?” said the bee-master, in answer to a question I had put to
him. “We never allow swarming here. My bees have to work for me, and
not for themselves; so we have discarded that old-fashioned notion long
ago.”
He brought his honey-barrow to a halt, and sat down ruminatively on the
handle.
“Swarming,” he went on to explain, “is the great trouble in modern
bee-keeping. It is a bad legacy left us by the old-time skeppists. With
the ancient straw hives and the old benighted methods of working, it was
all very well. When bee-burning was the custom, and all the heaviest
hives were foredoomed to the sulphur-pit, the best bees were those that
gave the earliest and the largest swarms. The more stocks there were in
the garden the more honey there would be for market. Swarming was
encouraged in every possible way. And so, at last, the steady,
stay-at-home variety of honey-bee became exterminated, and only the
inveterate swarmers were kept to carry on the strain.”
I quoted the time-honoured maxim about a swarm in May being worth a load
of hay. The bee-master laughed derisively.
“To the modern bee-keeper,” he said, “a swarm in May is little short of a
disgrace. There is no clearer sign of bad beemanship nowadays than when
a strong colony is allowed to weaken itself by swarming on the eve of the
great honey-flow, just when strength and numbers are most needed. Of
course, in the old days, the maxim held true enough. The straw skeps had
room only for a certain number of bees, and when they became too crowded
there was nothing for it but to let the colonies split up in the natural
way. But the modern frame-hive, with its extending brood-chamber, does
away with that necessity. Instead of the old beggarly ten or twelve
thousand, we can now raise a population of forty or fifty thousand bees
in each hive, and so treble and quadruple the honey-harvest.”
“But,” I asked him, “do not the bees go on swarming all the same, if you
let them?”
“The old instincts die hard,” he said. “Some day they will learn more
scientific ways; but as yet they have not realised the change that modern
bee-keeping has made in their condition. Of course, swarming has its
clear, definite purpose, apart from that of relieving the congestion of
the stock. When a hive swarms, the old queen goes off with the flying
squadron, and a new one takes her place at home. In this way there is
always a young and vigorous queen at the head of affairs, and the
well-being of the parent stock is assured. But advanced bee-keepers,
whose sole object is to get a large honey yield, have long recognised
that this is a very expensive way of rejuvenating old colonies. The
parent hive will give no surplus honey for that season; and the swarm,
unless it is a large and very early one, will do little else than furnish
its brood-nest for the coming winter. But if swarming be prevented, and
the stock requeened artificially every two years, we keep an immense
population always ready for the great honey-flow, whenever it begins.”
He took up the heavy barrow, laden with its pile of super-racks, and
started trundling it up the path, talking as he went.
“If only the bees could be persuaded to leave the queen-raising to the
bee-keeper, and would attend to nothing else but the great business of
honey-getting! But they won’t—at least, not yet. Perhaps in another
hundred years or so the old wild habits may be bred out of them; but at
present it is doubtful whether they are conscious of any ‘keeping’ at
all. They go the old tried paths determinedly; and the most that we can
accomplish is to undo that part of their work which is not to our liking,
or to make a smoother road for them in the direction they themselves have
chosen.”
“But you said just now,” I objected, “that no swarming was allowed among
your bees. How do you manage to prevent it?”
“It is not so much a question of prevention as of cure. Each hive must
be watched carefully from the beginning. From the time the queen
commences to lay, in the first mild days of spring, we keep the size of
the brood nest just a little ahead of her requirements. Every week or
two I put in a new frame of empty combs, and when she has ten frames to
work upon, and honey is getting plentiful, I begin to put on the
store-racks above, just as I am doing now. This will generally keep them
to business; but with all the care in the world the swarming fever will
sometimes set in. And then I always treat it in this way.”
He had stopped before one of the hives, where the bees were hanging in a
glistening brown cluster from the alighting-board; idling while their
fellows in the bee-garden seemed all possessed with a perfect fury of
work. I watched him as he lighted the smoker, a sort of bellows with a
wide tin funnel packed with chips of dry rotten wood. He stooped over
the hive, and sent three or four dense puffs of smoke into the entrance.
“That is called subduing the bees,” he explained, “but it really does
nothing of the kind. It only alarms them, and a frightened bee always
rushes and fills herself with honey, to be ready for any emergency. She
can imbibe enough to keep her for three or four days; and once secure of
immediate want, she waits with a sort of fatalistic calm for the
development of the trouble threatening.”
He halted a moment or two for this process to complete itself, then began
to open the hive. First the roof came off; then the woollen quilts and
square of linen beneath were gradually peeled from the tops of the
comb-frames, laying bare the interior of the hive. Out of its dim depths
came up a steady rumbling note like a train in a tunnel, but only a few
of the bees got on the wing and began to circle round our heads
viciously. The frames hung side by side, with a space of half an inch or
so between. The bee-master lifted them out carefully one by one.
“Now, see here,” he said, as he held up the first frame in the sunlight,
with the bees clinging in thousands to it, “this end comb ought to have
nothing but honey in it, but you see its centre is covered with
brood-cells. The queen has caught the bee-man napping, and has extended
her nursery to the utmost limit of the hive. She is at the end of her
tether, and has therefore decided to swarm. Directly the bees see this
they begin to prepare for the coming loss of their queen by raising
another, and to make sure of getting one they always breed three or
four.”
He took out the next comb and pointed to a round construction, about the
size and shape of an acorn, hanging from its lower edge.
“That is a queen cell; and here, on the next comb, are two more. One is
sealed over, you see, and may hatch out at any moment; and the others are
nearly ready for closing. They are always carefully guarded, or the old
queen would destroy them. And now to put an end to the swarming fit.”
He took out all the combs but the four centre ones; and, with a goose
wing, gently brushed the bees off them into the hive. The six combs were
then taken to the extricating-house hard by. The sealed honey-cells on
all of them were swiftly uncapped, and the honey thrown out by a turn or
two in the centrifugal machine. Now we went back to the hive. Right in
the centre the bee-master put a new, perfectly empty comb, and on each
side of this came the four principal brood frames with the queen still on
them. Outside of these again the combs from which we had extracted all
the honey were brought into position. And then a rack of new sections
was placed over all, and the hive quickly closed up. The entire process
seemed the work of only a few minutes.
“Now,” said the bee-master triumphantly, as he took up his barrow again,
“we have changed the whole aspect of affairs. The population of the hive
is as big as ever; but instead of a house of plenty it is a house of
dearth. The larder is empty, and the only cure for impending famine is
hard work; and the bees will soon find that out and set to again.
Moreover, the queen has now plenty of room for laying everywhere, and
those exasperating prison-cradles, with her future rivals hatching in
them, have been done away with. She has no further reason for flight,
and the bees, having had all their preparations destroyed, have the best
of reasons for keeping her. Above all, there is the new super-rack,
greatly increasing the hive space, and they will be given a second and
third rack, or even a fourth one, long before they feel the want of it.
Every motive for swarming has been removed, and the result to the
bee-master will probably be seventy or eighty pounds of surplus honey,
instead of none at all, if the bees had been left to their old primæval
ways.”
“You must always remember, however,” he added, as a final word, “that
bees do nothing invariably. ’Tis an old and threadbare saying amongst
bee-keepers, but there’s nothing truer under the sun. Bees have
exceptions to almost every rule. While all other creatures seem to keep
blindly to one pre-ordained way in everything they do, you can never be
certain at any time that bees will not reverse their ordinary course to
meet circumstances you may know nothing of. And that is all the more
reason why the bee-master himself should allow no deviations in his own
work about the hives: his ways must be as the ways of the Medes and
Persians.”
CHAPTER VII
NIGHT ON A HONEY-FARM
THE sweet summer dusk was over the bee-farm. On every side, as I passed
through, the starlight showed me the crowding roofs of the city of hives;
and beyond these I could just make out the dim outline of the
extracting-house, with a cheerful glow of lamplight streaming out from
window and door. The rumble of machinery and the voices of the
bee-master and his men grew louder as I approached. A great business
seemed to be going forward within. In the centre of the building stood a
strange-looking engine, like a brewer’s vat on legs. It was eight or
nine feet broad and some five feet high; and a big horizontal wheel lay
within the great circle, completely filling its whole circumference. As
I entered, the wheel was going round with a deep reverberating noise as
fast as two strong men could work the gearing; and the bee-master stood
close by, carefully timing the operation.
“Halt!” he shouted. The great wheel-of-fortune stopped. A long iron bar
was pulled down and the wheel rose out of the vat. Now I could see that
its whole outer periphery was covered with frames of honeycomb, each in
its separate gauze-wire cage. The bee-master tugged a lever. The
cages—there must have been twenty-five or thirty of them—turned over
simultaneously like single leaves of a book, bringing the other side of
each comb into place. The wheel dropped down once more, and swung round
again on its giddy journey. From my place by the door I could hear the
honey driving out against the sides of the vat like heavy rain.
“Halt!” cried the bee-master again. Once more the big wheel rose,
glistening and dripping, into the yellow lamplight. And now a trolley
was pushed up laden with more honeycomb ready for extraction. The
wire-net cages were opened, the empty combs taken out, and full ones
deftly put in their place. The wheel plunged down again into its
mellifluous cavern, and began its deep song once more. The bee-master
gave up his post to the foreman, and came towards me, wiping the honey
from his hands. He was very proud of his big extractor, and quite
willing to explain the whole process. “In the old days,” he said, “the
only way to get the honey from the comb was to press it out. You could
not obtain your honey without destroying the comb, which at this season
of the year is worth very much more than the honey itself; for if the
combs can be emptied and restored perfect to the hive, the bees will fill
them again immediately, without having to waste valuable time in the
height of the honey-flow by stopping to make new combs. And when the
bees are wax-making they are not only prevented from gathering honey, but
have to consume their own stores. While they are making one pound of
comb they will eat seventeen or eighteen pounds of honey. So the man who
hit upon the idea of drawing the honey from the comb by centrifugal force
did a splendid thing for modern bee-farming. English honey was nothing
until the extractor came and changed bee-keeping from a mere hobby into
an important industry. But come and see how the thing is done from the
beginning.”
[Picture: “The Wax Makers”]
He led the way towards one end of the building. Here three or four men
were at work at a long table surrounded by great stacks of honeycombs in
their oblong wooden frames. The bee-master took up one of these.
“This,” he explained, “is the bar-frame just as it comes from the hive.
Ten of them side by side exactly fill a box that goes over the hive
proper. The queen stays below in the brood-nest, but the worker bees
come to the top to store the honey. Then, every two or three days, when
the honey-flow is at its fullest, we open the super, take out the sealed
combs, and put in combs that have been emptied by the extractor. In a
few days these also are filled and capped by the bees, and are replaced
by more empty combs in the same way; and so it goes on to the end of the
honey-harvest.”
We stood for a minute or two watching the work at the table. It went on
at an extraordinary pace. Each workman seized one of the frames and
poised it vertically over a shallow metal tray. Then, from a vessel of
steaming hot water that stood at his elbow, he drew the long, flat-headed
Bingham knife, and with one swift slithering cut removed the whole of the
cell-tappings from the surface of the comb. At once the knife was thrown
back into its smoking bath, and a second one taken out, with which the
other side of the comb was treated. Then the comb was hung in the rack
of the trolley, and the keen hot blades went to work on another frame.
As each trolley was fully loaded it was whisked off to the
extracting-machine and another took its place.
“All this work,” explained the bee-master, as we passed on, “is done
after dark, because in the daytime the bees would smell the honey and
would besiege us. So we cannot begin extracting until they are all
safely hived for the night.” He stopped before a row of bulky cylinders.
“These,” he said, “are the honey ripeners. Each of them holds about
twenty gallons, and all the honey is kept here for three or four days to
mature before it is ready for market. If we were to send it out at once
it would ferment and spoil. In the top of each drum there are fine wire
strainers, and the honey must run through these, and finally through
thick flannel, before it gets into the cylinder. Then, when it is ripe,
it is drawn off and bottled.”
One of the big cylinders was being tapped at the moment. A workman came
up with a kind of gardener’s water-tank on wheels. The valve of the
honey-vat was opened, and the rich fluid came gushing out like liquid
amber. “This is all white-clover honey,” said the bee-master, tasting it
critically. “The next vat there ought to be pure sainfoin. Sometimes
the honey has a distinct almond flavour; that is when hawthorn is
abundant. Honey varies as much as wine. It is good or bad according to
the soil and the season. Where the horse-chestnut is plentiful the honey
has generally a rank taste. But this is a sheep-farmers’ country, where
they grow thousands of acres of rape and lucerne and clover for
sheep-feed; and nothing could be better for the bees.”
By this time the gardener’s barrow was full to the brim. We followed it
as it was trundled heavily away to another part of the building. Here a
little company of women were busy filling the neat glass jars, with their
bright screw-covers of tin; pasting on the label of the big London
stores, whither most of the honey was sent; and packing the jars into
their travelling-cases ready for the railway-van in the morning. The
whole place reeked with the smell of new honey and the faint,
indescribable odour of the hives. As we passed out of the busy scene of
the extracting-house into the moist dark night again, this peculiar
fragrance struck upon us overpoweringly. The slow wind was setting our
way, and the pungent odour from the hives came up on it with a solid,
almost stifling, effect.
“They are fanning hard to-night,” said the bee-master, as we stopped
halfway down the garden. “Listen to the noise they’re making!”
The moon was just tilting over the tree-tops. In its dim light the place
looked double its actual size. We seemed to stand in the midst of a
great town of bee-dwellings, stretching vaguely away into the darkness.
And from every hive there rose the clear deep murmur of the ventilating
bees.
The bee-master lighted his lantern, and held it down close to the
entrance of the nearest hive.
“Look how they form up in rows, one behind the others with their heads to
the hive; and all fanning with their wings! They are drawing the hot air
out. Inside there is another regiment of them, but those are facing the
opposite way, and drawing the cool air in. And so they keep the hive
always at the right temperature for honey-making, and for hatching out
the young bees.”
“Who was it,” he asked ruminatively, as the gate of the bee-farm closed
at last behind us, and we were walking homeward through the glimmering
dusk of the lane—“who was it first spoke of the ‘busy bee’? Busy! ’Tis
not the word for it! Why, from the moment she is born to the day she
dies the bee never rests nor sleeps! It is hard work night and day, from
the cradle-cell to the grave; and in the honey-season she dies of it
after a month or so. It is only the drone that rests. He is very like
some humans I know of his own sex; he lives an idle life, and leaves the
work to the womenkind. But the drone has to pay for it in the end, for
the drudging woman-bee revolts sooner or later. And then she kills him.
In bee-life the drone always dies a violent death; but in human
life—well, it seems to me a little bee-justice wouldn’t be amiss with
some of them.”
CHAPTER VIII
IN A BEE-CAMP
“’TIS a good thing—life; but ye never know how good, really, till you’ve
followed the bees to the heather.”
It was an old saying of the bee-master’s, and it came again slowly from
his lips now, as he knelt by the camp-fire, watching the caress of the
flames round the bubbling pot. We were in the heart of the Sussex
moorland, miles away from the nearest village, still farther from the
great bee-farm where, at other times, the old man drove his thriving
trade. But the bees were here—a million of them perhaps—all singing
their loudest in the blossoming heather that stretched away on every side
to the far horizon, under the sweltering August sun.
Getting the bees to the moors was always the chief event of the year down
at the honey-farm. For days the waggons stood by the laneside, all ready
to be loaded up with the best and most populous hives; but the exact
moment of departure depended on one very uncertain factor. The
white-clover crop was almost at an end. Every day saw the acreage of
sainfoin narrowing, as the sheep-folds closed in upon it, leaving nothing
but bare yellow waste, where had been a rolling sea of crimson blossom.
But the charlock lay on every hillside like cloth-of-gold. Until harvest
was done the fallows were safe from the ploughshare, and what proved
little else than a troublesome weed to the farmer was like golden guineas
growing to every keeper of bees.
But at last the new moon brought a sharp chilly night with it, and the
long-awaited signal was given. Coming down with the first grey glint of
morning from the little room under the thatch, I found the bee-garden in
a swither of commotion. A faint smell of carbolic was on the air, and
the shadowy figures of the bee-master and his men were hurrying from hive
to hive, taking off the super-racks that stood on many three and four
stories high. The honey-barrows went to and fro groaning under their
burdens; and the earliest bees, roused from their rest by this unwonted
turmoil, filled the grey dusk with their high timorous note.
The bee-master came over to me in his white overalls, a weird apparition
in the half-darkness.
“’Tis the honey-dew,” he said, out of breath, as he passed by. “The
first cold night of summer brings it out thick on every oak-leaf for
miles around; and if we don’t get the supers off before the bees can
gather it, the honey will be blackened and spoiled for market.”
He carried a curious bundle with him, an armful of fluttering pieces of
calico, and I followed him as he went to work on a fresh row of hives.
From each bee-dwelling the roof was thrown off, the inner coverings
removed, and one of the squares of cloth—damped with the carbolic
solution—quickly drawn over the topmost rack. A sudden fearsome buzzing
uprose within, and then a sudden silence. There is nothing in the world
a bee dreads more than the smell of carbolic acid. In a few seconds the
super-racks were deserted, the bees crowding down into the lowest depths
of the hives. The creaking barrows went down the long row in the track
of the master, taking up the heavy racks as they passed. Before the sun
was well up over the hill-brow the last load had been safely gathered in,
and the chosen hives were being piled into the waggons, ready for the
long day’s journey to the moors.
All this was but a week ago; yet it might have been a week of years, so
completely had these rose-red highland solitudes accepted our invasion,
and absorbed us into their daily round of sun and song. Here, in a green
hollow of velvet turf, right in the heart of the wilderness, the camp had
been pitched—the white bell-tents with their skirts drawn up, showing the
spindle-legged field-bedsteads within; the filling-house, made of lath
and gauze, where the racks could be emptied and recharged with the little
white wood section-boxes, safe from marauding bees; the honey-store, with
its bee-proof crates steadily mounting one upon the other, laden with
rich brown heather-honey—the finest sweet-food in the world. And round
the camp, in a vast spreading circle, stood the hives—a hundred or
more—knee-deep in the rosy thicket, each facing outward, and each a
whirling vortex of life from early dawn to the last amber gleam of sunset
abiding under the flinching silver of the stars.
The camp-fire crackled and hissed, and the pot sent forth a savoury steam
into the morning air. From the heather the deep chant of busy thousands
came over on the wings of the breeze, bringing with it the very spirit of
serene content. The bee-master rose and stirred the pot ruminatively.
“B’iled rabbit!” said he, looking up, with the light of old memories
coming in his gnarled brown face. “And forty years ago, when I first
came to the heather, it used to be b’iled rabbit too. We could set a
snare in those days as well as now. But ’twas only a few hives then, a
dozen or so of old straw skeps on a barrow, and naught but the starry
night for a roof-tree, or a sack or two to keep off the rain. None of
your women’s luxuries in those times!”
He looked round rather disparagingly at his own tent, with its plain
truckle-bed, and tin wash-bowl, and other deplorable signs of effeminate
self-indulgence.
“But there was one thing,” he went on, “one thing we used to bring to the
moors that never comes now. And that was the basket of sulphur-rag.
When the honey-flow is done, and the waggons come to fetch us home again,
all the hives will go back to their places in the garden none the worse
for their trip. But in the old days of bee-burning never a bee of all
the lot returned from the moors. Come a little way into the long grass
yonder, and I’ll show ye the way of it.”
With a stick he threshed about in the dry bents, and soon lay bare a row
of circular cavities in the ground. They were almost choked up with moss
and the rank undergrowth of many years but originally they must have been
each about ten inches broad by as many deep.
“These,” said the bee-master, with a shamefaced air of confession, “were
the sulphur-pits. I dug them the first year I ever brought hives to the
heather; and here, for twenty seasons or more, some of the finest and
strongest stocks in Sussex were regularly done to death. ’Tis a drab
tale to tell, but we knew no better then. To get the honey away from the
bees looked well-nigh impossible with thousands of them clinging all over
the combs. And it never occurred to any of us to try the other way, and
get the bees to leave the honey. Yet bee-driving, ’tis the simplest
thing in the world, as every village lad knows to-day.”
We strolled out amongst the hives, and the bee-master began his leisurely
morning round of inspection. In the bee-camp, life and work alike took
their time from the slow march of the summer sun, deliberate,
imperturbable, across the pathless heaven. The bees alone keep up the
heat and burden of the day. While they were charging in and out of the
hives, possessed with a perfect fury of labour, the long hours of
sunshine went by for us in immemorial calm. Like the steady rise and
fall of a windless tide, darkness and day succeeded one another; and the
morning splash in the dew-pond on the top of the hill, and the song by
the camp-fire at night, seemed divided only by a dim formless span too
uneventful and happy to be called by the old portentous name of Time.
And yet every moment had its business, not to be delayed beyond its
imminent season. Down in the bee-farm the work of honey-harvesting
always carried with it a certain stress and bustle. The great
centrifugal extractor would be roaring half the night through, emptying
the super-combs, which were to be put back into the hives on the morrow,
and refilled by the bees. But here, on the moors, modern bee-science is
powerless to hurry the work of the sunshine. The thick heather-honey
defies the extracting-machine, and cannot be separated without destroying
the comb. Moorland honey—except where the wild sage is plentiful enough
to thin down the heather sweets—must be left in the virgin comb; and the
bee-man can do little more than look on as vigilantly as may be at the
work of his singing battalions, and keep the storage-space of the hives
always well in advance of their need.
Yet there is one danger—contingent at all seasons of bee-life, but doubly
to be guarded against during the critical time of the honey-flow.
As we loitered round the great circle, the old bee-keeper halted in the
rear of every hive to watch the contending streams of workers, the one
rippling out into the blue air and sunshine, the other setting more
steadily homeward, each bee weighed down with her load of nectar and pale
grey pollen, as she scrambled desperately through the opposing crowd and
vanished into the seething darkness within. As we passed each hive, the
old bee-man carefully noted its strength and spirit, comparing it with
the condition of its neighbours on either hand. At last he stopped by
one of the largest hives, and pointed to it significantly.
“Can ye see aught amiss?” he asked, hastily rolling his shirt-sleeves up
to the armpit.
I looked, but could detect nothing wrong. The multitude round the
entrance to this hive seemed larger and busier than with any other, and
the note within as deeply resonant.
“Ay! they’re erpulous enough,” said the bee-master, as he lighted his
tin-nozzled bellows-smoker and coaxed it into full blast. “But hark to
the din! ’Tis not work this time; ’tis mortal fear of something. Flying
strong? Ah, but only a yard or two up, and back again. There’s trouble
at hand, and they’ve only just found it out. The matter is, they have
lost their queen.”
He was hurriedly removing the different parts of the hive as he spoke. A
few quick puffs from the smoker were all that was needed at such a time.
With no thought but for the tragedy that had come upon them, the bees
were rushing madly to and fro in the hive, not paying the slightest
attention to the fact that their house was falling asunder piecemeal and
the sudden sunshine riddling it through and through, where had been
nothing but Cimmerian darkness before. Under the steady slow hand of the
master, the teeming section-racks came off one by one, until the lowest
chamber—the nursery of the hive—was reached, and a note like imprisoned
thunder in miniature burst out upon us.
The old bee-keeper lifted out the brood-frames, and subjected each to a
lynx-eyed scrutiny. At last he dived his bare hand down into the thick
of the bees, and brought up something to show me. It was the dead queen;
twice the size of all the rest, with short oval wings and a shining
red-gold body, strangely conspicuous among the score or so of
dun-coloured workers which still crowded round her on the palm of his
hand.
“In the old days,” said the bee-master, “before the movable-comb hive was
invented, if the queen died like this, it would throw the whole colony
out of gear for the rest of the season. Three weeks must elapse before a
new queen could be hatched and got ready for work; and then the
honey-harvest would be over. But see how precious time can be saved
under the modern system.”
He led the way to a hive which stood some distance apart from the rest.
It was much smaller than the others, and consisted merely of a row of
little boxes, each with its separate entrance, but all under one common
roof. The old bee-man opened one of the compartments, and lifted out its
single comb-frame, on which were clustered only a few hundred bees.
Searching among these with a wary forefinger, at last he seized one by
the wings and held it up to view.
“This is a spare queen,” said he. “’Tis always wise to bring a few to
the heather, against any mischance. And now we’ll give her to the
motherless bees; and in an hour or two the stock will be at work again as
busily as ever.”
CHAPTER IX
THE BEE-HUNTERS
“IN that bit of forest,” said the bee-master, indicating a long stretch
of neighbouring woodland with one comprehensive sweep of his thumb,
“there are tons of honey waiting for any man who knows how to find it.”
I had met and stopped the old bee-keeper and his men, bent on what seemed
a rather singular undertaking. They carried none of the usual implements
of their craft, but were laden up with the paraphernalia of
woodmen—rip-saws and hatchets and climbing-irons, and a mysterious box or
two, the use of which I could not even guess at. But the bee-master soon
made his errand plain.
“Tons of honey,” he went on. “And we are going to look for some of it.
There have been wild bees, I suppose, in the forest country from the
beginning of things. Then see how the land lies. There are villages all
round, and for ages past swarms have continually got away from the
bee-gardens, and hived themselves in the hollow trunks of the trees.
Then every year these stray colonies have sent out their own swarms
again, until to-day the woods are full of bees, wild as wolves and often
as savage, guarding stores that have been accumulating perhaps for years
and years.”
He shifted his heavy kit from one shoulder to the other. Overhead the
sun burned in a cloudless August sky, and the willow-herb by the roadside
was full of singing bees and the flicker of white butterflies. In the
hedgerows there were more bees plundering the blackberry blossom, or
sounding their vagrant note in the white convolvulus-bells which hung in
bridal wreaths at every turn of the way. Beyond the hedgerow the yellow
cornlands flowed away over hill and dale under the torrid light; and each
scarlet poppy that hid in the rustling gold-brown wheat had its winged
musician chanting at its portal. As I turned and went along with the
expedition, the bee-master gave me more details of the coming enterprise.
“Mind you,” he said, “this is not good beemanship as the moderns
understand it. It is nothing but bee-murder, of the old-fashioned kind.
But even if the bees could be easily taken alive, we should not want them
in the apiary. Blood counts in bee-life, as in everything else; and
these forest-bees have been too long under the old natural conditions to
be of any use among the domestic strain. However, the honey is worth the
getting, and if we can land only one big stock or two it will be a
profitable day’s work.”
We had left the hot, dusty lane, and taken to the field-path leading up
through a sea of white clover to the woods above.
“This is the after-crop,” said the bee-master, as he strode on ahead with
his jingling burden. “The second cut of Dutch clover always gives the
most honey. Listen to the bees everywhere—it is just like the roar of
London heard from the top of St Paul’s! And most of it here is going
into the woods, more’s the pity. Well, well; we must try to get some of
it back to-day.”
Between the verge of the clover-field and the shadowy depths of the
forest ran a broad green waggon-way; and here we came to a halt. In the
field we had lately traversed the deep note of the bees had sounded
mainly underfoot; but now it was all above us, as the honeymakers sped to
and fro between the sunlit plane of blossom and their hidden storehouses
in the wood. The upper air was full of their music; but, straining the
sight to its utmost, not a bee could be seen.
“And you will never see them,” said the bee-master, watching me as he
unpacked his kit. “They fly too fast and too high. And if you can’t see
them go by out here in the broad sunshine, how will you track them to
their lair through the dim light under the trees? And yet,” he went on,
“that is the only way to do it. It is useless to search the wood for
their nests; you might travel the whole day through and find nothing.
The only plan is to follow the laden bees returning to the hive. And now
watch how we do that in Sussex.”
From one of the boxes he produced a contrivance like a flat tin saucer
mounted on top of a pointed stick. He stuck this in the ground near the
edge of the clover-field so that the saucer stood on a level with the
highest blossoms. Now he took a small bottle of honey from his pocket,
emptied it into the tin receptacle, and beckoned me to come near.
Already three or four bees had discovered this unawaited feast and
settled on it; a minute more and the saucer was black with crowding bees.
Now the bee-master took a wire-gauze cover and softly inverted it over
the saucer. Then, plucking his ingenious trap up by the roots, he set
off towards the forest with his prisoners, followed by his men.
“These,” said he, “are our guides to the secret treasure-chamber.
Without them we might look for a week and never find it. But now it is
all plain sailing, as you’ll see.”
He pulled up on the edge of the wood. By this time every bee in the trap
had forsaken the honey, and was clambering about in the top of the
dome-shaped lid, eager for flight.
“They are all full of honey,” said the bee-master, “and the first thing a
fully-laden bee thinks of is home. And now we will set the first one on
the wing.”
He opened a small valve in the trap-cover, and allowed one of the bees to
escape. She rose into the air, made a short circle, then sped away into
the gloom of the wood. In a moment she was lost to sight, but the main
direction of her course was clear; and we all followed helter-skelter
until our leader called another halt.
“Now watch this one,” he said, pressing the valve again.
This time the guide rose high into the dim air, and was at once lost to
my view. But the keen eyes of the old bee-man had challenged her.
“There she goes!” he said, pointing down a long shadowy glade somewhat to
his left. “Watch that bit of sunlight away yonder!”
I followed this indication. Through the dense wood-canopy a hundred feet
away the sun had thrust one long golden tentacle; and I saw a tiny spark
of light flash through into the gloom beyond. We all stampeded after it.
Another and another of the guides was set free, each one taking us deeper
into the heart of the forest, until at last the bee-master suddenly
stopped and held up his hand.
“Listen!” he said under his breath.
Above the rustling of the leaves, above the quiet stir of the undergrowth
and the crooning of the stock-doves, a shrill insistent note came over to
us on the gentle wind. The bee-man led the way silently into the darkest
depths of the wood. Halting, listening, going swiftly forward in turn,
at last he stopped at the foot of an old decayed elm-stump. The shrill
note we had heard was much louder now, and right overhead. Following his
pointing forefinger, I saw a dark cleft in the old trunk about twenty
feet above; and round this a cloud of bees was circling, filling the air
with their rich deep labour-song. At the same instant, with a note like
the twang of a harp-string, a bee came at me and fastened a red-hot
fish-hook into my cheek. The old bee-keeper laughed.
“Get this on as soon as you can,” he said, producing a pocketful of
bee-veils, and handing me one from the bunch. “These are wild bees,
thirty thousand of them, maybe; and we shall need all our armour to-day.
Only wait till they find us out! But now rub your hands all over with
this.”
Every man scrambled into his veil, and anointed his hands with the oil of
wintergreen—the one abiding terror of vindictive bees. And then the real
business of the day commenced.
The bee-master had strapped on his climbing-irons. Now he struck his way
slowly up the tree, tapping the wood with the butt-end of a hatchet inch
by inch as he went. At last he found what he wanted. The trunk rang
hollow about a dozen feet from the ground. Immediately he began to cut
it away. The noise of the hatchet woke all the echoes of the forest.
The chips came fluttering to the earth. The rich murmur overhead changed
to an angry buzzing. In a moment the bees were on the worker in a vortex
of humming fury, covering his veil, his clothes, his hands. But he
worked on unconcernedly until he had driven a large hole through the
crust of the tree and laid bare the glistening honeycomb within. Now I
saw him take from a sling-bag at his side handful after handful of some
yellow substance and heap it into the cavity he had made. Then he struck
a match, lighted the stuff, and came sliding swiftly to earth again. We
all drew off and waited.
“That,” explained the bee-master, as he leaned on his woodman’s axe out
of breath, “is cotton-waste, soaked in creosote, and then smothered in
powdered brimstone. See! it is burning famously. The fumes will soon
fill the hollow of the tree and settle the whole company. Then we shall
cut away enough of the rotten wood above to get all the best of the combs
out; there are eighty pounds of good honey up there, or I’m no bee-man.
And then it’s back to the clover-field for more guide-bees, and away on a
new scent.”
CHAPTER X
THE PHYSICIAN IN THE HIVE
IT was a strange procession coming up the red-tiled path of the bee
garden. The bee-master led the way in his Sunday clothes, followed by a
gorgeous footman, powdered and cockaded, who carried an armful of wraps
and cushions. Behind him walked two more, supporting between them a kind
of carrying-chair, in which sat a florid old gentleman in a Scotch plaid
shawl; and behind these again strode a silk-hatted, black-frocked man
carefully regulating the progress of the cavalcade. Through the rain of
autumn leaves, on the brisk October morning, I could see, afar off, a
carriage waiting by the lane-side; a big old-fashioned family vehicle,
with cockaded servants, a pair of champing greys, and a glitter of gold
and scarlet on the panel, where the sunbeams struck on an elaborate
coat-of-arms.
The whole procession made for the extracting-house, and all work stopped
at its approach. The great centrifugal machine ceased its humming. The
doors of the packing-room were closed, shutting as the din of saw and
hammer. Over the stone floor in front of the furnace—where a big caldron
of metheglin was simmering—a carpet was hastily unrolled, and a
comfortable couch brought out and set close to the cheery blaze.
And now the strangest part of the proceedings commenced. The old
gentleman was brought in, partially disrobed, and transferred to the
couch by the fireside. He seemed in great trepidation about something.
He kept his gold eyeglasses turned on the bee-master, watching him with a
sort of terrified wonder, as the old bee-man produced a mysterious box,
with a lid of perforated zinc, and laid it on the table close by. From
my corner the whole scene was strongly reminiscent of the ogre’s kitchen
in the fairy-tale; and the muffled sounds from the packing-room might
have been the voice of the ogre himself, complaining at the lateness of
his dinner.
Now, at a word from the black-coated man, the bee-master opened his box.
A loud angry buzzing uprose, and about a dozen bees escaped into the air,
and flew straight for the window-glass. The bee-master followed them,
took one carefully by the wings, and brought it over to the old
gentleman. His apprehensions visibly redoubled. The doctor seized him
in an iron, professional grip.
“Just here, I think. Close under the shoulder-blade. Now, your lordship
. . . ”
Viciously the infuriated bee struck home. For eight or ten seconds she
worked her wicked will on the patient. Then, turning round and round,
she at last drew out her sting, and darted back to the window.
But the bee-master was ready with another of his living stilettos. Half
a dozen times the operation was repeated on various parts of the
suffering patient’s body. Then the old gentleman—who, by this time, had
passed from whimpering through the various stages of growing indignation
to sheer undisguised profanity—was restored to his apparel. The
procession was re-formed, and the bee-master conducted it to the waiting
carriage, with the same ceremony as before.
As we stood looking after the retreating vehicle, the old bee-man entered
into explanations.
“That,” said he, “is Lord H—, and he has been a martyr to rheumatism
these ten years back. I could have cured him long ago if he had only
come to me before, as I have done many a poor soul in these parts; but
he, and those like him, are the last to hear of the physician in the
hive. He will begin to get better now, as you will see. He is to be
brought here every fortnight; but in a month or two he will not need the
chair. And before the winter is out he will walk again as well as the
best of us.”
We went slowly back through the bee-farm. The working-song of the bees
seemed as loud as ever in the keen October sunshine. But the steady deep
note of summer was gone; and the peculiar bee-voice of autumn—shrill,
anxious, almost vindictive—rang out on every side.
“Of course,” continued the bee-master, “there is nothing new in this
treatment of rheumatism by bee-stings. It is literally as old as the
hills. Every bee-keeper for the last two thousand years has known of it.
But it is as much as a preventive as a cure that the acid in a bee’s
sting is valuable. The rarest thing in the world is to find a bee-keeper
suffering from rheumatism. And if every one kept bees, and got stung
occasionally, the doctors would soon have one ailment the less to trouble
about.”
“But,” he went on, “there is something much pleasanter and more valuable
to humanity, ill or well, to be got from the hives. And that is the
honey itself. Honey is good for old and young. If mothers were wise
they would never give their children any other sweet food. Pure ripe
honey is sugar with the most difficult and most important part of
digestion already accomplished by the bees. Moreover, it is a safe and
very gentle laxative. And probably, before each comb-cell is sealed up,
the bee injects a drop of acid from her sting. Anyway, honey has a
distinct aseptic property. That is why it is so good for sore throats or
chafed skins.”
We had got back to the extracting house, where the great caldron of
metheglin was still bubbling over the fire. The old bee-keeper relieved
himself of his stiff Sunday coat, donned his white linen overalls, and
fell to skimming the pot.
“There is another use,” said he, after a ruminative pause, “to which
honey might be put, if only doctors could be induced to seek curative
power in ancient homely things, as they do with the latest new poisons
from Germany. That is in the treatment of obesity. Fat people, who are
ordered to give up sugar, ought to use honey instead. In my time I have
persuaded many a one to try it, and the result has always been the same—a
steady reduction in weight, and better health all round. Then, again,
dyspeptic folk would find most of their troubles vanish if they
substituted the already half-digested honey wherever ordinary sugar forms
part of their diet. And did you ever try honey to sweeten tea or coffee?
Of course, it must be pure, and without any strongly-marked flavour; but
no one would ever return to sugar if once good honey had been tried in
this way, or in any kind of cookery where sugar is used.”
The bee-master ran his fingers through his hair, of which he had a
magnificent iron-grey crop. The fingers were undeniably sticky; but it
was an old habit of his, when in thoughtful mood, and the action seemed
to remind him of something. His eyes twinkled merrily.
“Now,” said he, “you are a writer for the papers, and you may therefore
want to go into the hair-restoring business some day. Well, here is a
recipe for you. It is nothing but honey and water, in equal parts, but
it is highly recommended by all the ancient writers on beemanship. Have
I tried it? Well, no; at least, not intentionally. But in extracting
honey it gets into most places, the hair not excepted. At any rate,
honey as a hair-restorer was one of the most famous nostrums of the
Middle Ages, and may return to popular favour even now. However, here is
something there can be no question about.”
He went to a cupboard, and brought out a jar full of a viscid yellow
substance.
“This,” he said, “is an embrocation, and it is the finest thing I know
for sprains and bruises. It is made of the wax from old combs, dissolved
in turpentine, and if we got nothing else from the hives bee-keeping
would yet be justified as a humanitarian calling. Its virtues may be in
the wax, or they may be due to the turpentine, but probably they lie in
another direction altogether. Bees collect a peculiar resinous matter
from pine trees and elsewhere, with which they varnish the whole surface
of their combs, and this may be the real curative element in the stuff.”
Now, with a glance at the clock, the bee-master went to the open door and
hailed his foreman in from his work about the garden. Between them they
lifted away the heavy caldron from the fire, and tilted its steaming
contents into a barrel close at hand. The whole building filled at once
with a sweet penetrating odour, which might well have been the
concentrated fragrance of every summer flower on the countryside.
“But of all the good things given us by the wise physician of the hive,”
quoth the old bee-keeper, enthusiastically, “there is nothing so good as
well-brewed metheglin. This is just as I have made it for forty years,
and as my father made it long before that. Between us we have been
brewing mead for more than a century. It is almost a lost art now; but
here in Sussex there are still a few antiquated folk who make it, and
some, even, who remember the old methers—the ancient cups it used to be
quaffed from. As an everyday drink for working-men, wholesome,
nourishing, cheering, there is nothing like it in or out of the Empire.”
CHAPTER XI
WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-FARM
THE light snow covered the path through the bee-farm, and whitened the
roof of every hive. In the red winter twilight it looked more like a
human city than ever, with its long double rows of miniature houses
stretching away into the dusk on either hand, and its broad central
thoroughfare, where the larger hives crowded shoulder to shoulder,
casting their black shadows over the glimmering snow.
The bee-master led the way towards the extracting-house at the end of the
garden, as full of his work, seemingly, as ever he had been in the press
of summer days. There was noise enough going on in the long lighted
building ahead of us, but I missed the droning song of the great
extractor itself.
[Picture: “Hard Times for the Bees”]
“No; we have done with honey work for this year,” said the old bee-man.
“It is all bottled and cased long ago, and most of it gone to London.
But there’s work enough still, as you’ll see. The bees get their long
rest in the winter; but, on a big honey-farm, the humans must work all
the year round.”
As we drew into the zone of light from the windows, many sounds that from
afar had seemed incongruous enough on the silent, frost-bound evening
began to explain themselves. The whole building was full of busy life.
A furnace roared under a great caldron of smoking syrup, which the
foreman was vigorously stirring. In the far corner an oil engine clanked
and spluttered. A circular saw was screaming through a baulk of timber,
slicing it up into thin planks as a man would turn over the leaves of a
book. Planing machines and hammers and handsaws innumerable added their
voices to the general chorus; and out of the shining steel jaws of an
implement that looked half printing-press and half clothes-wringer there
flowed sheet after sheet of some glistening golden material, the use of
which I could only dimly guess at.
But I had time only for one swift glance at this mysterious monster. The
bee-master gripped me by the arm and drew me towards the furnace.
“This is bee-candy,” he explained, “winter food for the hives. We make a
lot of it and send it all over the country. But it’s ticklish work.
When the syrup comes to the galloping-point it must boil for one minute,
no more and no less. If we boil it too little it won’t set, and if too
much it goes hard, and the bees can’t take it.”
He took up his station now, watch in hand, close to the man who was
stirring, while two or three others looked anxiously on.
“Time!” shouted the bee-master.
The great caldron swung off the stove on its suspending chain. Near the
fire stood a water tank, and into this the big vessel of boiling syrup
was suddenly doused right up to the brim, the stirrer labouring all the
time at the seething grey mass more furiously than ever.
“The quicker we can cool it the better it is,” explained the old
bee-keeper, through the steam. He was peering into the caldron as he
spoke, watching the syrup change from dark clear grey to a dirty white,
like half-thawed snow. Now he gave a sudden signal. A strong rod was
instantly passed through the handles of the caldron. The vessel was
whisked out of its icy bath and borne rapidly away. Following hard upon
its heels, we saw the bearers halt near some long, low trestle-tables,
where hundreds of little wooden boxes were ranged side by side. Into
these the thick, sludgy syrup was poured as rapidly as possible, until
all were filled.
“Each box,” said the bee-master, as we watched the candy gradually
setting snow-white in its wooden frames, “each box holds about a pound.
The box is put into the hive upside-down on the top of the comb-frames,
just over the cluster of bees; and the bottom is glazed because then you
can see when the candy is exhausted, and the time has come to put on
another case. What is it made of? Well, every maker has his own private
formula, and mine is a secret like the rest. But it is sugar,
mostly—cane-sugar. Beet-sugar will not do; it is injurious to the bees.
“But candy-making,” he went on, as we moved slowly through the populous
building, “is by no means the only winter work on a bee-farm. There are
the hives to make for next season; all those we shall need for ourselves,
and hundreds more we sell in the spring, either empty or stocked with
bees. Then here is the foundation mill.”
He turned to the contrivance I had noticed on my entry. The thin amber
sheets of material, like crinkled glass, were still flowing out between
the rollers. He took a sheet of it as it fell, and held it up to the
light. A fine hexagonal pattern covered it completely from edge to edge.
“This,” he said, “we call super-foundation. It is pure refined wax,
rolled into sheets as thin as paper, and milled on both sides with the
shapes of the cells. All combs now are built by the bees on this
artificial foundation; and there is enough wax here, thin as it is, to
make the entire honeycomb. The bees add nothing to it, but simply knead
it and draw it out into a comb two inches wide; and so all the time
needed for wax-making by the bees is saved just when time is most
precious—during the short season of the honey-flow.”
He took down a sheet from another pile close at hand.
“All that thin foundation,” he explained, “is for section-honey, and will
be eaten. But this you could not eat. This is brood-foundation, made
extra strong to bear the great heat of the lower hive. It is put into
the brood-nest, and the cells reared on it are the cradles for the young
bees. See how dense and brown it is, and how thick; it is six or seven
times as heavy as the other. But it is all pure wax, though not so
refined, and is made in the same way, serving the same useful,
time-saving purpose.”
We moved on towards the store-rooms, out of the clatter of the machinery.
“It was a great day,” he said, reflectively, “a great day for bee-keeping
when foundation was invented. The bee-man who lets his hives work on the
old obsolete natural system nowadays makes a hopeless handicap of things.
Yet the saving of time and bee-labour is not the only, and is hardly the
most important, outcome of the use of foundation. It has done a great
deal more than that, for it has solved the very weighty problem of how to
keep the number of drones in a hive within reasonable limits.”
He opened the door of a small side-room. From ceiling to floor the walls
were covered with deep racks loaded with frames of empty comb, all ready
for next season. Taking down a couple of the frames, he brought them out
into the light.
“These will explain to you what I mean,” said he. “This first one is a
natural-built comb, made without the milled foundation. The centre and
upper part, you see, is covered on both sides with the small cells of the
worker-brood. But all the rest of the frame is filled with larger cells,
and in these only drones are bred. Bees, if left to themselves, will
always rear a great many more drones than are needed; and as the drones
gather no stores but only consume them in large quantities, a
superabundance of the male-bees in a hive must mean a diminished
honey-yield. But the use of foundation has changed all that. Now look
at this other frame. By filling all brood-frames with worker-foundation,
as has been done here, we compel the bees to make only small cells, in
which the rearing of drones is almost impossible; and so we keep the
whole brood-space in the hive available for the generation of the working
bee alone.”
“But,” I asked him, “are not drones absolutely necessary in a hive? The
population cannot increase without the male bees.”
“Good drones are just as important in a bee-garden as high-mettled,
prolific queens,” he said; “and drone-breeding on a small scale must form
part of the work on every modern bee-farm of any size. But my own
practice is to confine the drones to two or three hives only. These are
stationed in different parts of the farm. They are always selected
stocks of the finest and most vigorous strain, and in them I encourage
drone-breeding in every possible way. But the male bees in all
honey-producing hives are limited to a few hundreds at most.”
Coming out into the darkness from the brilliantly-lighted building, we
had gone some way on our homeward road through the crowded bee-farm
before we marked the change that had come over the sky. Heavy vaporous
clouds were slowly driving up from the west and blotting the stars out
one by one. All their frosty sparkle was gone, and the night air had no
longer the keen tooth of winter in it. The bee-master held up his hand.
“Listen!” he said. “Don’t you hear anything?”
I strained my ears to their utmost pitch. A dog barked forlornly in the
distant village. Some night-bird went past overhead with a faint
jangling cry. But the slumbering bee-city around us was as silent and
still as death.
“When you have lived among bees for forty years,” said the bee-master,
plodding on again, “you may get ears as long as mine. Just reckon it
out. The wind has changed; that curlew knows the warm weather is coming;
but the bees, huddled together in the midst of a double-walled hive,
found it out long ago. Now, there are between three and four hundred
hives here. At a very modest computation, there must be as many bees
crowded together on these few acres of land as there are people in the
whole of London and Brighton combined. And they are all awake, and
talking, and telling each other that the cold spell is past. That is
what I can hear now, and shall hear—down in the house yonder—all night
long.”
CHAPTER XII
THE QUEEN BEE: IN ROMANCE AND REALITY
“QUEENS?” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, as he filled his pipe with the
blackest and strongest tobacco I had ever set eyes on; “queens? There
are hundreds of hives here, as you can see; and there isn’t a queen in
any one of them.”
He drew at the pipe until he had coaxed it into full blast, and the smoke
went drifting idly away through the still April sunshine. We were in the
very midst of the bee-garden, sitting side by side on the honey-barrow
after a long morning’s work among the hives; and the old bee-man had
lapsed into his usual contemplative mood.
“’Tis a pretty idea,” he went on, “this of royalty, and a realm of
dutiful subjects, and all the rest of it, in bee-life. But experience in
apiculture, as with most things of this world, does away with a good many
fine and fanciful notions. Now, the mother-bee in a hive, whatever else
you might call her, is certainly not a queen, in the sense of ruling over
the other bees in the colony. The truth is she has little or nothing to
do with the direction of affairs. All the thinking and contriving is
done by the worker-bees. They have the whole management of the hive, and
simply look upon the queen as a much prized and carefully-guarded piece
of egg-laying machinery, to be made the most of as long as her usefulness
lasts, but to be thrown over and replaced by another the moment her
powers begin to flag.”
“No; there are no queens, properly so called, in bee-life,” he continued.
“All that belongs to the good old times when there were nothing but
straw-skeps, and ’twas well-nigh impossible to get at the rights of
anything; so the bee-keeper went on believing that honey was made out of
starshine, and young bees were bred from the juice of white honeysuckle,
which was all pretty enough in its way, even though it warn’t true. But
nowadays, when they make hives with comb-frames that can be lifted out
and looked at in the broad light of day, folk are beginning to understand
a power of things about bees that were dark mysteries only a while ago.”
He puffed at his pipe for a little in silence. Far away over the great
province of hives, the clock on the extracting-house pointed to half-past
twelve; and, true to their usual time, the home-staying bees—the
housekeepers and nurses and lately hatched young ones—were out for their
midday exercise. The foragers were going to and fro as thickly as ever
with their loads of pollen and water for the still cradled larvæ within;
but now round every hive a little cloud of bees hovered, filling the
sunshine with the drowsy music of their wings. The old bee-man took up
his theme again presently at the point he had broken it off.
“If,” said he, “you keep a fairly close watch on the progress of any one
particular hive, from the time the first eggs appear in the combs early
in January, ’tis very easy to see how the old false ideas got into
general use. At first glance a bee-colony looks very much like a
kingdom; and the single large bee, that all the others pay court to and
attend so carefully, seems very like a queen. Then, when you look a
little deeper and begin to understand more, appearances are still all in
favour of the old view of things. The mother-bee seems, on the face of
it, a miracle of intelligence and foresight. While, as far as you know,
all other creatures in the world bring forth their young of both sexes
haphazard, this one can lay male or female eggs apparently at will. You
watch her going from comb to comb, and the eggs she drops in the small
cells hatch out females, and those she puts in the larger ones are always
males, or drones. More than that: she seems always to know the exact
condition of the hive, and to be able to limit her egg-laying according
to its need, or otherwise, of population; for either you see her filling
only a few cells each day in a little patch of comb that can be covered
with the palm of your hand, or she goes to work on a gigantic scale, and,
in twenty-four hours, produces eggs that weigh more than twice as much as
her whole body.”
He got up now and began pacing to and fro, as was his custom when much in
earnest over his bee-talk.
“Then,” he went on, “to cap all, as the honey season draws on to its
height, you are forced presently to realise that the queen has conceived
and is carrying through a scheme for the good of her subjects that would
do credit to the wisest ruler ever born in human purple. Every day of
summer sunshine has brought thousands of young bees to life. The hive is
getting overcrowded. Sooner or later one of two things must
happen—either the increase of population must be checked, or a great
party must be formed to leave the old home and go out to establish
another one. Then it is that the mother-bee seems to prove beyond a
doubt her wisdom and queenliness. She decides for the emigration; but as
a leader must be found for the party, and none is at hand, she forms the
resolve to head it herself. From that moment a change comes over the
whole hive. Preparation for the coming event goes on fast and furiously,
and excitement increases day by day. But the queen seems to forget
nothing. A new ruler for the old realm must be provided to take her
place when she is gone for ever; and now you see a party of bees set to
work on something that fairly beggars curiosity. At first it looks
exactly like an acorn-cup in wax hanging from the under-edge of the comb.
Perhaps the next time you look the cup has grown to twice its original
size; and now you see it is half full of a glistening white jelly. The
next time, maybe, you open the hive, the acorn has been added to the cup;
the queen-cell is sealed over and finished, and about a week later there
comes out a full-grown queen bee, twice the size of the ordinary worker
and quite different in shape and often in colour too. But days before
the new ruler is ready the excitement in the hive has grown to
fever-pitch. If you come out then in the quiet of the night and put your
ear close to the hive, you will hear a shrill piping noise which the
ancient skeppists tell you is the old queen calling her subjects together
for the swarm on the morrow. And, sure enough, out she goes with half
the population of the hive in her train, to look for a new home; and in a
day or so the new queen comes out of her cell to take charge of the
colony.”
He paused to fill the old briar pipe again, lighting it with slow
deliberate puffs, and I could not help marking how nearly alike in colour
were the bowl and his rugged, sunburnt, clever face.
“But now, look you!” said he, suddenly levelling the pipe-stem like a
pistol at me to emphasise his words. “If the mother-bee really brought
all this about, queen would not be a good enough name for her. But the
truth is, throughout all the wonder-workings of the hive, the queen is
little more than an instrument, a kind of automaton, merely doing what
the workers compel her to do. They are the real queens in the hive, and
the mother-bee is the one and only subject. Did you ever think what a
queen-bee actually is, and how she comes to be there at all? The fact is
that the workers have made her for their own wise purposes, just as they
make the comb and the honey to store in it. The egg she is hatched from
is in no way different from any worker-egg. If you take one from a
queen-cell and put it in the ordinary comb, it will hatch out a common
female worker-bee: and an egg transferred from worker-comb to a
queen-cell becomes a full-grown queen. Thousands and thousands of
worker-eggs are laid in a hive during the season, and each of those could
be made into a queen if the workers chose. But the worker-egg is laid
into a small cell, and the larva is bred on a bare minimum of food, at
the least possible cost in time, trouble, and space to the hive; while,
when a new queen is wanted, a cell as big as your finger-top is built,
and the larva is stuffed like a prize-pig through all its five days of
active life, until, with unlimited food and time and room to grow in, it
comes out at last a perfect mother-bee.”
“But,” I asked him, “how is the population in the hive regulated, and how
can the apportionment of the sexes be brought about? If, as you say, the
queen does only what she is made to do by the workers, and that
unthinkingly and mechanically, you only increase the difficulty of the
problem.”
“As for increasing or restricting the number of eggs laid,” he said,
“that is only a question of food; and here you see how the workers
control the mother-bee entirely, and, through her, the whole condition of
the hive. When she is egg-laying they feed her from their own mouths
with special predigested food; and the more she gets of this, the more
eggs are laid. But when the season is done, and the need for a large
population over, this rich stimulating diet is kept from her. She then
must go to the honey-cells like the rest, or starve; and at once her
egg-laying powers begin to fall off. And it is in exactly the same
way—by their management of the queen—that the workers control the
proportion of the sexes in a hive. ’Tis more difficult to explain, but
here is about the rights of it. Directly the new-hatched queen-bee is
ready for work, she flies out to meet the drones; and one impregnation
lasts her whole life through. But the eggs themselves are not fertilised
until the very moment of laying, and then only in the case of those laid
in worker-comb: drone-eggs are never impregnated at all. Now, in all
likelihood, as the queen is being driven over the combs, it is the size
of the cell that determines whether the egg laid shall be male or female.
When the queen thrusts her long pointed body into the narrow worker-cell,
her position is a straight, upright one, and the egg cannot be laid
without passing over the impregnation-gland; but with the larger
drone-cell the queen has room to curve herself, which is the means, I
think, of the egg escaping without being fertilised. And so you see it
is only the female bee that has two parents; the drone has no father at
all.”
CHAPTER XIII
THE SONG OF THE HIVES
FROM the lane, where it dipped down between its rose-mantled hedges,
nothing of the bee-garden could be seen. The dense barricade of briar
and hawthorn hid all but the lichened roof of the ancient dwelling-house;
and strangers going by on their way to the village saw nothing of the
crowding hives, and marked little else than the usual busy murmur of
insect-life common to any sunny day in June.
But when they came out of the green tunnel of hedgerows into the open
fields beyond, chance wayfarers always stopped and looked about them
wonderingly, at length fixing a puzzled glance intently on the blue sky
itself. At this corner, and nowhere else, seemingly, the air was full of
a deep, reverberant music. A steady torrent of rich sound streamed by
overhead; and yet, to the untutored observer, the most diligent scrutiny
failed to reveal its origin. A few gnats harped in the sunbeams. Now
and again a bumble-bee struck a deep chord or two in the wayside herbage
underfoot. But this clear, strong voice from the skies was altogether
unexplainable. To human sight, at least, the blue air and sunshine held
nothing to account for it; and the stranger unversed in honey-bee lore,
after taking his fill of this melodious mystery, generally ended by
giving up the problem as insoluble, and passing on to his business or
pleasure in the little green-garlanded hamlet under the hill.
That the bees of a fairly large apiary should produce a considerable
volume of sound in their passage to and fro between the hives and the
honey-pastures is in no way remarkable. In the heyday of the year—the
brief six weeks’ honey-flow of the English summer—probably each normal
colony of bees would send out an army of foragers at least twenty
thousand strong. What really seems matter for wonder is the way in which
bees appear to concentrate their movements to certain well-defined tracks
in the atmosphere. They do not distribute themselves broadcast over the
intervening space, as they might be expected to do, but wonderfully keep
to certain definite restricted thoroughfares, no matter how near or how
remote their foraging grounds may be.
And this particular gap in the chain of hedgerows really marked the great
main highway for the bees between the hives and the clover-fields
silvering the whole wide stretch of hill and dale beyond. Every moment
had its winged thousands going and returning. At any time, if a fine net
could have been cast suddenly a few fathoms upward, it would have fallen
to earth black and heavy with bees; but the singing multitude went by at
so fast and furious a pace that, to the keenest sight, not one of the
eager crew was visible. Only the sound of their going was plain to all;
a mighty tenor note abroad in the sunshine, a thronging sustained melody
that never ceased all through the heat and burthen of the glittering
summer’s day.
When Shelley heard the “yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,” and he of Avonside
wrote of “singing masons building roofs of gold,” probably neither
thought of the humming of the hive-bee as anything more than an
ingredient in the general delightful country chorus, as distinct from the
less-inspiring labour-note of busy humanity in a town. With the single
exception, perhaps, of Wordsworth, poets, thinking most of their line,
commonly miss the subtler phases of wild life, such as the continually
changing emphasis and capricious variation in bird song, the real sound
made by growth, or the unceasing movement of things conventionally held
to be inert. And in the same way the endlessly varied song of the bees
has been epitomised by imaginative writers generally into a sound,
pleasantly arcadian enough, but little more suggestive of life and
meaning than the hum of telegraph wires in a breeze.
Yet there are few sounds in nature more bewilderingly complex than this.
For every season in the year the song of the hives has its own distinct
appropriate quality, and this, again, is constantly influenced by the
time of day, and even by the momentary aspect of the weather. A
bee-keeper of the old school—and he is sure to be the “character,” the
quaint original of a village—manages his hives as much by ear as by
sight. The general note of each hive reveals to him intuitively its
progress and condition. He seems to know what to expect on almost any
day in the year, so that if Rip van Winkle had been an apiarist the
nearest bee-garden would have been as sure a guide to him, in respect of
the time of year at least, as the sun’s declining arc in the heaven is to
the tired reapers in respect of the hour of day.
Most people—and with these must be included even lifelong
country-dwellers—are wont to regard the humming of the hive-bee as a
simple monotone, produced entirely by the rapid movement of the wings.
But this conception halts very far short of the actual truth. In
reality, the sound made by a honey-bee is threefold. It can consist
either of a single tone, a combination of two notes, or even a grand
triple chord, heard principally in moments of excitement, such as when a
swarming-party is on the wing, or in late autumn and early spring, when
civil war will often break out in an ill-managed apiary. The actual
buzzing sound is produced by the wings; the deeper musical tones by the
air alternately sucked in and driven out through the spiracles, which are
breathing-tubes ranged along each side of a bee’s body; while the shrill,
clarinet-like note comes from the true voice-apparatus itself. In
ordinary flight it is the wings and the respiration-tubes conjointly
which produce the steady volume of sound heard as the honey-makers stream
over the hedgetop towards the distant clover-fields; and this is the note
also that pervades the bee-garden through every sunny hour of the
working-day. The rich, soft murmur coming from the spiracles is probably
never heard except when the bee is flying, but both the true voice and
the whirring wing-melody are familiar as separate sounds to every
bee-keeper who studies his hives.
When the summer night has shut down warm and still over the red dusk of
evening, and the last airy loiterer is safely home from the fields, a
curious change comes to the bee-garden. The old analogy between a
concourse of hives and a human city is, at this season, utterly at fault.
Silence and rest after the day’s work may be the portion of the larger
community, but in the time of the great honey-flow there is neither rest
nor slumber for the bees. A fury of labour possesses them, one and all;
and darkness does not remit, but merely transposes the scene of their
activity. Coming out into the garden at this hour for a quiet pipe among
the hives—an old and favourite habit with most bee-keeping veterans—the
new spirit abroad is at once manifest. The sulky, fragrant darkness is
silent, quiet with the influence of the starshine overhead; but the very
earth of the footway seems to vibrate with the imprisoned energy of the
hives. This is the time when the low, rustling roar of wing-music can
best be heard, and one of the most wonderful phases of bee-life studied.
The problem of the ventilation of human hives is attacked commonly on one
main principle—unstinted ingress for fresh air and a like abundant means
of outward passage for the bad. But, if the bees are to be credited,
modern sanitary scientists are trimming altogether on the wrong tack. A
colony of bees will allow one aperture, and one alone, in the hive, to
serve all and every purpose. If the enterprising novice in beemanship
gimlets a row of ventilation-holes in the back of his hive—an idea that
occurs to most tyros in apiculture—the bees will infallibly seal them all
up again before morning. They work on entirely different principles,
impelled by their especial needs. The economy of the hive requires the
temperature to be absolutely and immediately within the control of the
bees, and this is only possible when the ventilatory system is entirely
mechanical. The evaporation of moisture from the new-gathered nectar,
and the hatching of the young brood, necessitate an amount of heat much
less than that required for wax-generating; as soon as the wax-makers
begin to cluster the temperature of the hive is at once increased. But
if a current of air were continually passing through the hive these
necessary heat variations would be difficult to manage, even supposing
them possible at all; so the bees have invented their unique system of a
single passageway, combined with an ingenious and complicated process of
fanning, by which the fresh air is sucked in at one side of the entrance
and the foul air drawn out at the other, the atmosphere of the hive being
thus maintained in a constant state of circulation, fast or slow,
according to the temperature needed.
In the hot summer weather these fanning-parties are at work continuously,
being relieved by others at intervals of a few minutes throughout the
day. But at night, when the whole population of the hive is at home, the
need for ventilation is greatly augmented, and then the open lines of
fanners often stretch out over the alighting-board six or seven ranks
deep, making an harmonious uproar that, on a still night, will travel
incredible distances.
This tense, forceful labour-song of the bee-garden, heard unremittingly
throughout the hours of darkness, is always pleasant, often indescribably
soothing in its effect. But it is essentially a communal note,
expressive only of the well or ill being of the hive at large. The
individuality, even personal idiosyncrasy, which undoubtedly exists among
bees, finds its utterance mainly through the true voice-organ. You
cannot stand for long, here, in the quiet of the summer night, listening
to one particular hive, without sooner or later becoming aware of other
sounds, in addition to the general musical hubbub of the fanning army.
It is evident that a nervous, high-strung spirit pervades the colony,
especially during the season of the great honey-flow. Their common
agreement on all main issues does not prevent these “virgin daughters of
toil” from engaging in sundry sharp altercations and mutual hustlings in
the course of their business; and, at times of threatening weather, a
tendency towards snappishness, and a whimsical perversity
characteristically feminine, seem to make up the prevailing tone. It is
during these chance forays that the true voice of the honey-bee, apart
from the sounds made by wing and spiracle, can best be differentiated.
CHAPTER XIV
CONCERNING HONEY
THE bee-keepers in English villages to-day are all familiar—too familiar
at times—with the holiday-making stranger at the garden gate inquiring
for honey. Somehow or other the demand for this old natural sweet-food
appears to have greatly increased of recent years among wandering
townsfolk in the country. A competent bee-master, dealing with a large
number of combs, will not mingle them indiscriminately, but will
unerringly assort them, so that he will have perhaps at the end of the
season almost as many kinds of honey in store as there are fields on his
countryside. I speak, of course, not of the large bee-farmer—who,
employing of necessity wholesale methods, can aim only at a good
all-round commercial sample of no finely distinctive colour or
flavour—but of the connoisseur in bee-craft, the gourmet among the hives,
who knows that there are as many varieties in honey as there are in wine,
and would as little dream of confusing them.
Honey lovers who have been eating wax all their days will be as hardly
dissuaded from the practice as he whose custom it may be to consume the
paper in which his butter is wrapped, or take a proportion of the blue
sugar-bag with the lumps in his tea. Yet the last are no more
absurdities than the former, except in degree. Pure beeswax has neither
savour nor nutrient properties, and passes wholly unassimilated through
the human system. Even the bees themselves cannot feed upon it when at
dire extremes: the whole hive may die of starvation in the midst of waxen
plenty. Of all creatures, mice, and the larva of two species of moth,
alone will make away with it; and even in their case it is doubtful
whether the comb be not destroyed for the sake of the odd grains of
pollen and the pupa-skins it contains. Broadly speaking, unless you can
trust a dipped finger-tip to reveal to you on the moment the qualities of
this village-garden honey, it is always safer to buy in the comb. But
the wax should never be eaten. The proper way to deal with honeycomb at
table is to cut it to the width of the knife-blade; and, laying it upon
the plate with the cells vertical, press the blade flat upon it, when the
honey will flow out right and left. In this way, if duly carried out,
the honey is scientifically separated, no more than one per cent
remaining in the slab of wax.
[Picture: “Honey-Comb: its various stages”]
_The Bee as a Chemist_
It is not strange, because it is so common, to find people who have eaten
honeycomb regularly all their lives, yet are unknowingly ignorant of the
first rudimentary fact in its nature and composition. To know that you
do not know is an intelligible state, the initial true step towards
knowledge; but to be full of erroneous information, and that
complacently, is to be ignorant indeed. Of such are the old lady who
dwelt in the Mile End Road, and believed that cocoanuts were monkeys’
eggs, and the man who will tell you without expectancy of contradiction
that honey is the food of bees.
Now this is no essay in cheap paradox, but a sober attempt to reinstate
in the public mind the unsophisticated truth. The natural foods of the
bee-hive are the nectar and the pollen, the “love ferment” of the
flowers. On these the bee subsists entirely, so long as she can obtain
them, and will go to her honey stores only when nature’s fresh supplies
have failed. One speaks by poetic licence, or looseness, of bees
gathering honey from blossoming plants. The fact is they do nothing of
the kind, and never did. The sweet juices of clover, heather, and the
like, differ fundamentally, both in appearance and in chemical properties
from honey. Though the main ingredient in honey is nectar, the two are
totally different things; and honey, far from being the normal food of
bees, is only a standby for hard times, a sort of emergency ration, put
up in as little compass and with as great a concentration as such things
can be.
The story of how honey is made, and why it is made at all, forms one of
the most interesting items in the history of the hive-bee. In a land
where nectar-yielding plants flourish all the year through, if such a
spot exist at all, there would be no honey, because the necessity for it
would not occur. Hive-bees in such a land would go all their lives, and
assuredly never dream of honey-making. But wherever there is winter, or
a season when the supply of nectar and pollen temporarily fails, the bee,
who does not hibernate in the common sense of the term, must devise a
means of supporting life through the famine period. Many creatures can
and do accomplish this by merely laying up in a comatose condition until
such time as their natural food is plentiful again, and they may safely
resume their old activities. But this will not do for the doughty
honey-bee. A curious aspect of her life is the way in which she appears
to recognise the competitive spirit in all the higher forms of earthly
existence, and deliberately sets herself in the fore-rank of affairs with
that principle in view. It would be easy for a few hundred worker-bees
to get together in some warm nook underground, with that carefully tended
piece of egg-laying mechanism, their queen, in their midst; and in a
semi-dormant condition to pass the dark winter months through, gradually
rousing their own fires of life as the year warmed up again in the
spring. But such a system would mean that the colony would have to start
afresh from the bottom of the ladder of progress with every year. The
hive-bee has conceived a better plan, and the basis, the essential factor
of it all, is this thing of mystery which we call honey.
_The True Purpose of the Hive_
The ancient Roman name for a beehive was _alvus_, which, translated into
its blunt Anglo-Saxon equivalent, means belly. And this gives us in a
word the whole secret about honey-making. As a matter of fact, the hive
in summer acts as a digestive chamber, wherein the winter aliment of the
stock is prepared. The bees, during their ordinary workaday life,
subsist on the nectar and pollen which they are continually bringing into
the hive. Much pollen is laid by in the cells in its raw condition, but
pollen is almost exclusively a tissue-former, and it is not used by the
worker-bees during the winter for their own sustenance, but preserved
until early spring, when it forms the principal component in the bee-milk
on which the larvæ are mainly fed. The nectar, however, is necessary at
all times to support life in the mature bees, and it must therefore be
stored for use during the long months when there are no flowers to
secrete it.
It is here that we get a glimpse into the ways of the honey-bee that may
well give spur to the most wonder-satiated amongst us. If a sample of
fresh nectar is examined, it will be found to consist of about seventy
per cent of water, the small remainder of its bulk being made up of what
is chemically known as cane sugar, together with a trace of certain
essential oils and aromatic principles. It is practically nothing but
sweetened and flavoured water. But ripe honey shows a very different
composition. The oils and essences are there, with some added acids; but
of water there is no more than seven to ten per cent; practically the
entire bulk of good honey consists of sugar, but it is grape sugar, with
scarce a trace of the cane sugar which nectar exclusively contains. To
put the thing in plainest words—the economic honey-bee, finding herself
with three or four months to get through at the least possible cost in
energy and nutriment, has scientifically reasoned out the matter, and,
among other ingenious provisions, has arranged to subject her winter food
to a process of pre-digestion during the summer, so that when she
consumes it there shall be neither force expended in its assimilation nor
waste products taken with it, needing to be afterwards expelled. Honey,
in fact, is the nectar digested, and then regurgitated just when it is
ready to be absorbed into the system. It is almost certain that every
drop goes through this process twice, and possibly three times, in each
case by different bees; and the heat of the hive still further
contributes to the object in view by driving off the superfluous moisture
from the nectar so treated, and thus concentrating it into an almost
perfect food.
CHAPTER XV
IN THE ABBOT’S BEE-GARDEN
STANDING in the lane without, and looking up at the grey forbidding walls
of the old abbey, you wondered how anything human could exist on the
other side; but, once past the heavy iron-studded gate, your thoughts
doubled like hares in the opposite direction.
It seemed good to be a monk, if life could be all sunshine, and quietude,
and beauty like that. As you waited in the shadow of the great
stone-flagged portico, while your coming was announced, this feeling grew
deeper with every moment. The garden sloped down to the river’s edge,
winding footway, and green lawn, and kitchen-plot all alike girdled and
barricaded with rich-hued autumn flowers. Through the mass of crimson
fuchsia and many-coloured dahlia and hollyhock, bowers of pink and white
geranium with stems as thick as your wrist, ancient apple-trees drooping
under their burden of scarlet fruit, crowding jungles of roses, you could
see the bright waters sweeping by, and hear their busy sound as they won
a way amidst the rocky boulders strewing the bed of the tortuous Devon
stream.
Here and there in the sunny field-of-view visible through the arched
doorway, black-robed figures were quietly at work: some digging; others
gathering apples in the orchard; one sturdy brother was mowing the
Abbot’s lawn, the bright blade coming perilously near his fluttering
skirts at every stroke; another went by trundling a wheelbarrow full of
green vegetables for the refectory table. There was a distant cackle of
poultry, blending oddly with the solemn chant that came from the chapel
hard by. Robins sang everywhere, and starlings clucked and whistled in
the valerian that topped the great encircling wall. But wherever you
looked, whatever drew away your attention for the moment, you were sure
to come back to the consideration of one preponderant yet inexplicable
thing. A steady, deep note was upon the air. Rich and resonant, it
seemed to come from all directions at once. The dim, grey-vaulted
entrance-porch was full of it. Looking up into the dusk of oaken beams
overhead, there it seemed at its strangest and loudest. Queerest fact of
all, it appeared to have some mysterious affinity with the sunshine, for
when a stray white argosy of cloud came drifting over the azure and
obscured for a minute the glad light, this full, sonorous note died
suddenly away, rising as swiftly again to its old power and volume when
the sunbeams glowed back once more over the spacious garden, and over the
riverside willows that shed their gold of dying leafage with every breath
of the soft south wind.
It was not until you stepped outside, and looked upward over the face of
the old building, that you realised what it all meant. From its
foundation to the highest stone of the ancient bell-turret, the whole
front of the place was thickly mantled with ivy in full flower, and every
yellow tuft of blossom was besieged with bees. There seemed tens of
thousands of them, hovering and humming everywhere; and thousands more
arriving with every moment out of the blue air, or darting off again
fully laden, and away to some invisible bourne over the ruddy roof of
orchard trees.
Intent on this vociferous wonder, you do not catch the footfall on the
gravel-path in your rear, or see the sombre figure of the Abbot as he
comes towards you, the sweep of his black frock setting all the marigolds
nodding behind him, as though from a sudden flaw of wind. And now you
have another pleasurable disillusionment as to monkish conditions of
being. Trudging along the deep-cut Devonshire lanes on your way to the
Abbey, through the rain of falling autumn leaves, you pictured the place
to yourself as a kind of sacred sink of desolation, inhabited by a crew
of sour-visaged anchorites, who found only godlessness in sunshine, and
in cakes-and-ale nothing but assured perdition. But here, coming towards
you, smiling, and with outstretched hand, is the last kind of human being
you expected to see. Clad from head to foot in sober black, with, for
ornament, but the one plain silver cross swinging at his breast, the
Abbot shows, unmistakably, for a gentleman of cultured and enlightened
mien. A fine, swarthy face, kind, calm eyes behind gold spectacles, a
voice like an old violin, and a grip of the hand that makes you wince
with its abounding welcome, all combine to set you there and then at your
ease; and talk begins at once on the old, familiar plane among
bee-keepers—the quick, enthusiastic interchange, each participant as
ready a listener as learner, common all the world over, wherever flowers
grow and men love bees.
The brothers of the old Benedictine monastery—so the Abbot tells you, as
he leads the way towards the hives, through the sun-riddled
labyrinth—have kept bees, probably, for more than a thousand years.
There is no doubt that the original abbey building stood there, in the
wooded cleft of Devon valley, so long ago as the sixth century, nor
little question that its founder was a bee-man, for he was contemporary
and friend of the great St Modonnoc who himself first taught Irishmen to
keep bees.
“Monks, in the very earliest times, were almost invariably
apiculturists,” argues the Abbot. He stops in the orchard, the more
impressively to quote Latin, the glib leaf-shadows playing the while over
his tonsured head. “Lac et mel; panis, vena rudis. Milk and honey, and
coarse oaten bread. At least we know, from our chronicles, that these
were the common daily fare of our Order more than eight hundred years
ago; and honey remains a part of our food to this day.”
Thus overawed with the centuries, you begin to form a mental picture of
the bee-garden you are about to visit, voyaging so pleasantly through
winding path and shady thicket, with the bell-like sound of the water
growing clearer and clearer at every step. With all that hoary tradition
of the ages behind them, you promise yourself, these monks will have
clung to their bee-keeping mediævalism as to some sacred, inviolable
thing. There will be no movable comb-frames, nor American sections, nor
weird, foreign races of bees. They will never have heard even of
foul-brood, or napthol-beta, or the host of things that bless or curse
modern apiculture at every turn of the way. But, instead, there will be
a tangled wilderness of late blossom, such as only Devonshire can show in
November; dome-shaped hives of straw, each with its singing company about
it; perhaps a superannuated brother or two quietly making straw hackles
to shield the hives against coming winter weather; even, perchance, the
smell of burning brimstone on the air, as the last remnant of the
honey-harvest is gathered in the ancient way, by “taking up” the
strongest and the weakest colonies of bees.
And then a wicket-gate in the old wall determines the path and your
ruminations together. A sudden burst of sunshine; the rich medley of
sound from fourscore hives lifting high above the song of the purling
stream; and you are out on the broad, green river-bank, looking on at a
scene very different from the one you have expected.
There are no old-fashioned hives; they are all of the latest, most
scientific pattern, ranged under the shelter of the wall in two wide
terraces of close-shaven turf, looking southward over the stream. There
are outhouses of the most approved design, where all the business of a
modern apiary is going on. Here and there you see black-frocked figures
at work, dexterously examining the colonies. There is the deep, whirring
note of honey-extractors; the clamour of carpenters’ tools; the faint,
sickly smell from the wax-boilers; all the familiar evidences of
bee-farming carried on in the most modern, twentieth-century way.
As you look down the long, trim avenue of gaily-painted hives your
companion has a quiet side-glance upon you, obviously noting your
disappointment.
“What would you?” says he, and his deep voice rings like a passing-bell
for all your dreams. “Everything must move with the times, or must
inevitably perish. Modernism, rightly understood, is God’s fairest, most
priceless gift to the universe. It is a crucible through which all
things of true metal must pass to lose the accumulated dross of the ages,
keeping their original pure substance, but taking the new shape required
of them by latter-day needs. It is so with the old, dim windows of man’s
faith; daily the glass is being taken out, smelted down, purified,
replaced; we can see abroad into distances now never before visible. And
so it must prove even with bee-keeping, which is one of the oldest human
occupations in the world.”
He waves his hand towards the sunny prospect before you. Beyond the
river the burning apple-woods soar steadily upward; and high above these,
stretching away to meet the blue sky, lie the Devon moorlands, once all
rose-red with blossoming heather, but now, parched and brown, except
where a grey crag or rock puts forth its jagged head.
“It is a fine thing, perhaps,” says the Abbot, thoughtfully swinging his
silver cross in the sunbeams, “to love old, ignorant customs, old,
benighted, useless errors, for their picturesqueness and beauty alone.
But don’t you think it is a still finer thing to teach poor people how
they may win from the common hillside plenty of rich, nourishing food at
almost no cost at all? And that is what we are doing here. Modern
bee-science, it is true, gives us only an ugly utilitarian hive. It
sweeps away all the bright, iridescent cobwebs in they path of
bee-keeping, and substitutes hard fact for pretty fairy-tale. But the
sum of it all is that the poor cottager gains, not twenty or thirty
pounds at most of coarse, unsaleable sweet food from his hives, but
perhaps hundredweights of pure, choice, section-honey, which, sold in the
proper market, will clothe his children comfortably, and make it possible
for them to lead decent human lives.”
CHAPTER XVI
BEES AND THEIR MASTERS
THERE are three great tokens of the coming of spring in the country—the
elm-blossom, the cry of the young lambs, and the first rich song of the
awakening bees.
All three come together about the end of February or beginning of March,
and break into the winter dearth and silence in much the same sudden,
unpremeditated way. You look at the woodlands, cowering under the lash
of the shrill north wind, and all seems bare and black and lifeless. But
the wind dies down in a fiery sunset. With the darkness comes a warm
breath out of the west. On the morrow the spring sunshine runs high
through all the valleys like liquid gold; the elm-tops are ablaze with
purple; from the lambing-pens far and near a new cry lifts into the
still, warm air; and in the bee-gardens there is the unwonted,
old-remembered symphony, prophetic of the coming summer days.
The shepherd, the bee-man, the woodlander—these three live in the focus
of the seasons, and feel their changes long before any other class of
country folk. But the bee-man, if he would prosper, must take the sun as
his veritable daily guide from year’s end to year’s end. Those whose
conception of a bee-keeper is mainly of one who looks on from his cottage
door while his winged thousands work for him, and who has but to stretch
out his hand once a year to gather the hoard he has had no part in
winning, know little of modern beemanship. This would be almost
literally true of the old skeppist days, when bees were left much to
their own devices, and thirty pounds of indifferent honey was reckoned a
good take from a populous hive. But the modern movable comb-frame has
altered all that. Now ninety or a hundred pounds weight of honey per
hive is expected, with ordinarily good seasons, on a well-managed
bee-farm; and in exceptional honey-flows very strong stocks of bees have
been known to double and even treble that amount.
The movable comb-frame has three prime uses. The hives can be opened at
any time and their condition ascertained without having to wait for
outside indications. Brood-combs, with the young bees all ready to hatch
out, can be taken from strong colonies and given to weak ones, and thus
the population of all stocks may be equalised. The filled honeycombs can
be removed, emptied by the centrifugal extractor, and the combs returned
to the hive ready for another charge; and so the most onerous and
exacting labour of the hive, comb-building, is largely obviated.
The modern beehive has another great advantage over the old straw skep,
in that its size can be regulated according to the needs of each colony.
More combs can be added as the stock grows, and thus no limit is set to
its capacity. With the ancient form of hive fifteen or twenty thousand
bees meant a crowded citadel, and there was nothing for it but to relieve
the congestion by swarming. But the swarming habit has always been the
principal obstacle to large honey-takes; and the problem which the modern
bee-keeper has to solve is how to prevent his stocks from thus breaking
themselves up into several hopelessly weak detachments.
It is all a war of wits between the bees and their masters. In nature
the honey-bee is possessed of an inveterate caution. Famine is
especially dreaded, and the number of mouths to fill in a hive is always
kept strictly to the limits of the incoming food-supply. Thus a natural
bee-colony is seldom ready for the honey-flow when it begins in early
April, because it is only then that the raising of the young brood is
allowed its fullest scope. This, however, is of no importance as far as
the bees themselves are concerned, for a balance of stores of about
twenty pounds weight at the end of a season will safely carry the most
populous colony through any ordinary winter.
But from the bee-master’s point of view it means practically a lost
harvest. All the arts and devices of the modern bee-keeper, therefore,
are set to work to overcome this timid conservatism of the hives, and to
induce the creation of immense colonies of worker-bees as early as
possible in the season, so that there may be no lack of labourers when
the harvest is ready.
These first warm days of March, that bring the elm-blossom, and the cry
of the lambs, and the old sweet music of the bee-gardens together, really
form the most critical time of all for the apiarist who depends on his
honey for his bread-and-butter. It is the natural beginning of the
bee-year, and on his skill as a craftsman from now onward all chance of a
prosperous season will rest. It is true that, within the hive, the bees
have been awake and stirring for a long time past. Ever since the “turn
of the days,” just before Christmas, the queen-mother has been busy; and
now there are young bees, little grey fluffy creatures, everywhere in the
throng; and the area of sealed brood-cells is steadily growing. But it
is only now that the world out-of-doors becomes of any interest to the
bees.
This is the time when the scientific bee-man must get to work. His whole
policy is one of benevolent fraud. He knows that the population in his
hives will not be allowed to increase until there is a steady, assured
income of nectar and pollen. He cannot create an early flower-crop, but
he does almost the same thing. Every hive is supplied with a
feeding-stage, where cane-sugar syrup, of nearly the same consistency as
the natural flower-secretion, is administered constantly; and he places
trays full of pea-flour at different stations amongst his hives, as a
substitute for pollen. There is a special art in the administration of
this sugar-syrup. One might think that if the bees required feeding at
all, the more they were given the better they would thrive. But
experience is all against this notion. The artificial food is given, not
to replenish an exhausted larder, but to simulate a natural new supply.
This, in the ordinary state of things, would begin in about a month’s
time, coming at first scantily, and gradually increasing. By
syrup-feeding early in March, the bee-master sets the clock of the year
forward by many weeks. He imitates nature by arranging his
feeding-stages so that the supply of syrup can be limited to the actual
day-to-day wants of the colony, allowing the bees freer access to the
syrup-bottles from time to time as their numbers augment.
If this is adroitly done, the effect on the colony is remarkable. The
little company of bees whose part it is to direct the actions of the
queen-mother, seeing what is apparently the natural fresh supply of food
coming in, in daily increasing quantities, at length cast their
hereditary reserve aside, and allow the queen fullest scope for
egg-laying. The result is that by the time the real honey-flow commences
the population of each hive is double what it would be if it had been
left to its own resources, and the honey-yield is more than
proportionately great. It is well know among bee-men that a hive
containing, say, forty thousand workers will produce very much more honey
than two hives together numbering twenty thousand each.
There is another vital consideration in this work of early stimulation of
the hives, which the capable bee-master will never neglect. When the
natural honey-glut is on, the whole hive reeks with the odours given off
from the evaporating nectar. The raw material, as gathered from the
flowers, must be reduced by the heat of the hive and other agencies to
about one-quarter of its original bulk before it is changed into mature
honey. The artificial food given to the bees will, of course, have none
of this scent, and the old honey-stores in the hive are hermetically
sealed under their waxen cappings. To complete the deception which has
been so elaborately contrived, the bee-master must furnish his hives with
a new atmosphere. This he does by slicing off the cappings from some of
the old store-combs, thus letting out their imprisoned fragrance, and
filling the hive at once with the very essence of the clover-fields where
the bees worked in the bygone summer days. The smell of the honey at
this time, combined with the regular and increasing supply of syrup, acts
like a powerful stimulant on the whole stock, and the work of
brood-raising goes rapidly forward.
In intensive culture of all kinds there are risks to be run peculiar to
the artificial state of things engendered, and modern bee-breeding is no
exception to the rule. When once this fictile prosperity is installed by
the bee-master, no lapse or variation in the due amount of food must
occur. Even a single day’s remission of supplies may undo all that a
month’s careful manipulation has brought about. English bees understand
their native climate only too well, and the bitter experience of former
years has taught them to be prepared for a return of hard weather at any
moment. Under natural conditions, if a few weeks’ warmth has induced
them to raise population, and a sudden return of cold ensues, the bees
will take very prompt and stern measures to meet the threatening calamity
of starvation. The queen will cease laying at once; all unhatched brood
will be ruthlessly torn from its cradle-cells and destroyed; old, useless
bees will be expelled from the colony. And this is exactly what will
happen if the artificial food-supply is allowed to fail even for the
shortest period.
CHAPTER XVII
THE HONEY THIEVES
WHERE the bee-garden lay, under its sheltering crest of pine-wood, the
April sunbeams seemed to gather, as water gathers in the lap of enclosing
hills. Out in the lane the sweet hot wind sang in the hedgerows, and the
white dust lifted under every footfall and went bowling merrily away on
the breeze. But once among the crowding hives, you were launched on a
still calm lake of sunshine, where the daffodils hardly swayed on their
slender stems; and the smoke from the bee-master’s pipe, as he came down
the red-tiled path, hung in the air behind him like blue gossamer spread
to catch the flying bees.
As usual, the old bee-man had an unexpected answer ready to the most
obvious question.
“When will the new honey begin to come in?” he said, repeating my
inquiry. “Well, the truth is honey never comes into the hives at all; it
only goes out. That’s the old mistake people are always falling into.
Good bees never gather honey: they leave that to the wicked ones. If I
had a hive of bees that took to honey-gathering, I should have to stop
them, or end them altogether. It would have to be either kill or cure.”
He took a quiet whiff or two, enjoying the effect of this seeming
paradox, then went on to explain.
“What the bees gather from the flowers,” said he, “is no more honey than
barley and hops are beer. Honey has to be manufactured, first in the
body of the bee, and then in the comb-cells. It must stand to brew in
the heat of the hive, just as the wort stands in the gyle-tun; and when
it is ready to be bunged down, before the bee adds the last little plate
of wax to the cell-capping, she turns herself about and, as I believe,
injects a drop of the poison from her sting—or seems to do so. Then it
is real honey, but not before. Now, about these bad bees, the
honey-gatherers—”
He stopped, putting his hand suddenly to his face. A bee had
unexpectedly fastened her sting into his cheek. At the same moment
another came at me like a spent shot from a gun, and struck home on my
own face. The old bee-man took a hurried survey of his hives.
“Why,” said he, “as luck, or ill-luck, will have it, I think I can show
you the honey-gatherers at work now. There’s only one thing that would
make my bees wild on such a morning as this; and we must find out where
the trouble is, and stop it.”
He was looking about him in every direction as he spoke; and at last, on
the farther side of the bee-garden, seemed to make out something amiss.
As we passed between the long rows of bee-dwellings every hive was the
centre of its own thronging busy life. From each there was a steady
stream of foragers setting outward into the brilliant sunshine, and as
constant a current homeward, as the bees returned heavily weighed down
under loads of golden pollen from the willows by the neighbouring
riverside. But round the hive, near which the bee-master presently came
to a halt, there was a very different scene enacting. The deep, rich
note of labour was replaced by an angry hubbub of war. The
alighting-board of the hive was covered with fighting bees; company
launched against company; single combats to the death; writhing masses of
bees locked together and tumbling furiously to the ground in every
direction. The soil about the hive was already thickly strewn with the
dead and dying: and the air, for yards round, was filled with the
piercing note of the fray. It seemed as hopeless to attempt to stop the
carnage as it was manifestly perilous to go near.
But the bee-master had his own short way with this, as with most other
difficulties. He took up a big watering-can and filled it hastily from
the butt close by.
“This hive is a weak stock,” he explained, “and it is being robbed by one
of the stronger ones. That is always the danger in spring. We must try
to drive the robbers home, and only one thing will do it. That is, a
heavy rainstorm; and as there is no chance of getting the real thing, we
must make one for ourselves.”
He strode into the thick of the flying bees, and raising the can above
his head, sent a steady cascade of water over the whole hive. The effect
was instantaneous. The fighting ceased at once. The marauding bees rose
on the wing and streamed away homeward. Those belonging to the attacked
hive scrambled into its friendly shelter, a bedraggled, sodden crew.
When at length all was quiet, the old bee-man fetched an armful of hay
and heaped it up before the hive, completely covering its entire front.
“If the robbers come back,” said he, “that will stop them going in, while
the bees inside can crawl to and fro if they wish. But at sunset we must
do away with the stock altogether by uniting it to another colony, and so
put temptation out of the robbers’ way. And now we must go and look for
the robbers’ den.”
He refilled his pipe, and led the way down the long thoroughfare of the
bee-city, examining every hive in turn as he passed.
“It is trouble of this kind,” he said, “that does more than anything else
to upset the instinct-theory of the old-fashioned naturalists, at least
as far as the honey-bee is concerned. Why should a whole houseful of
them suddenly break away from their old orderly industrious habits, and
take to thieving and violence? But so it often happens. There is
character, or the want of it, among bees just as there is in the human
race. Some are gentle and others vicious; some are hard workers early
and late, and others seem to take things easily, or to be subject to
unaccountable moods and caprices. Then the weather has an extraordinary
influence on the temper of most hives. On sunny, calm days, when the
glass is ‘set fair,’ and the clover in full bloom, the bees will take no
notice of any interference. The hives can be opened and manipulated
without the slightest fear of a sting. But if the glass is falling, or
the wind rising and backing, the bees will be often as spiteful as cats,
and as timid as squirrels. And there are times, just before a storm,
when to touch some hives would mean bringing the whole population out
upon you like a nest of hornets.”
He stopped by one of the hives, and laid his great sunburnt hand down
flat on the entrance-board. The bees took no account of the obstacle,
but ran to and fro over his fingers with perfect unconcern.
“And yet,” said he, “there are bees that follow none of these general
rules. Here is a stock which it is almost impossible to ruffle. You may
turn their home inside out, and they will go on working just as if
nothing had happened. They are famous honey-makers, while they keep to
it; but, like all mild-tempered bees, they are too fond of swarming, and
have to be put back into the hive two or three times before they settle
down to the season’s work.”
As he talked, he was looking about him carefully, and at last made a
short cut towards a hive standing a little apart from the rest. The bees
of this hive were behaving in a very different fashion from those we had
just inspected. They were running about the flight-board in an agitated
way, and the whole hive gave out a note of deep unrest. The old bee-man
puffed his “smoker” up into full draught, and set to work to open the
hive.
“These are the honey thieves,” he said, as he pulled off the coverings of
the hive and laid bare its rumbling, seething interior to the searching
sunlight, “and when once bees have taken to robbing their neighbours
there is only one way to cure them. You must exterminate the whole
brood. In the old days, a stock of bees with confirmed bad habits would
be taken to the sulphur-pit and settled at once for good and all. But
modern bee-keepers have a better and less wasteful way. Now, look out
for the queen!”
He was lifting out the comb-frames one by one, and subjecting them to a
close examination. At last, on one of the most crowded frames, he spied
the huge full-bodied queen, and lifted her off by the wings. Then he
closed the hive up again as expeditiously as possible.
“Now,” said he, as he ground the discredited monarch under his heel, “we
have stopped the mischief at the fountain-head. Of course, if we left
the bees to raise another queen for themselves, she would be of the same
blood as the first one, and her children would inherit the same
undesirable traits. But to-morrow, when the bees are thoroughly sobered
and frightened at the loss of their ruler, we will give them another
full-grown fertile queen of the best blood in the apiary. In three
weeks’ time the new population will begin to take over the citadel; and
in a month or two all the old bees will have died off, and with them the
last of the robber taint.”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE STORY OF THE SWARM
WHEN professional breeders of the honey-bee have succeeded in producing
the much-desired non-swarming race, and swarming has become a thing of
the past, naturalists of the old “instinct” school will be able to turn
their backs on at least one very inconvenient question.
There is no denying that the breeders are theoretically right in their
present efforts. The swarming-habit in the honey-bee is admittedly the
main obstacle to large honey-takes; and now that two of the principal
objects of swarming—the multiplication of stocks and renewal of
queens—are fairly well understood, and can be artificially effected,
there is no doubt that the universal adoption of a non-swarming strain
throughout the bee-farms of the country, if such a thing were possible,
would result in a very greatly increased honey-yield, and the people
would get cheap honey. But at present it is not easy to see that any
progress whatever in this direction has been made. The bees continue to
swarm, in spite of beautifully adjusted theories; and the old attempt to
fit the square peg of instinct into the round hole of fact goes on as
merrily as ever.
Students of bee-life, approaching the matter unencumbered by ancient
postulates, find themselves face to face with many surprising things,
which would seem unexplainable on any other hypothesis than that the bees
are endowed with reason, and that of no mean order.
Instinct implies invariability, a dead perfection of motive working
blindly against all odds of circumstance, and always succeeding in the
main. But the very essence of reason, humanly speaking, is its
imperfection and continual deviation both in motive and performance.
Watching a swarm of bees from the moment of its issue from the hive, the
first thing that strikes the unacademic observer is that most of the bees
seem to have no notion at all as to what the furore is about. They are
by no means the obedient items of a common inexorable purpose. They are
more like a crowd of people running in a street, all agog with excitement
and curiosity, but not one of them knowing the cause of the general
stampede. Sometimes a stock of bees will give visible sign of the
approach of a swarming-fit for several days before the swarm actually
issues. But, as often as not, no such manifestation is given. The hive,
at least to the unexpert eye, seems in its normal condition right up to
the moment when the great emigration takes place. And then, as at a
given signal, the work suddenly stops, and the bees pour out of the
hive-entrance in a living stream, darkening the air for many yards round,
the cloud of darting bees rising higher and higher, and spreading over a
greater space with every moment. The swarm may take three or four
minutes to get fairly on the wing; and, from a populous hive, may number
twenty-five or thirty thousand individuals.
[Picture: “Hiving a swarm”]
There is seldom any fear of stings at such a time, and this extraordinary
phase of bee-life may usually be studied at close quarters. One of the
most puzzling things about it is that, however large the swarm proves to
be, enough workers and drones are still left behind in the old hive to
carry on the work of the stock. When the order for the sally is given,
and a feverish excitement spreads at once throughout the hive, those bees
chosen to remain in the old dwelling are perfectly unmoved by the general
mad spirit. Directly the last of the trekking-party has gone off, the
home-bees set diligently and quietly to work as if nothing had happened.
With the whole garden alive with flashing wings, and resounding with the
rich deep hubbub of the swarm, the bees forming the remnant of the old
colony go about their usual business in perfect unconcern, lancing
straight off into the sunshine towards the clover-fields, or winging
busily homeward laden with honey and pollen, just as they have been doing
for weeks past. And if the hive be opened at this time, it will show
nothing unusual except that no queen will be found. There will be three
or four queen-cells like elongated acorns hanging from the edges of the
central combs; and the first queen to hatch out, and prove herself
happily mated, will be allowed to destroy all the others. For the rest,
work seems to be going on in a perfectly normal way. The nectar and
pollen are being stored in the cells; the young grubs are being fed; most
of the combs are fairly well covered with their busy population,
consisting principally of young bees, although a fair sprinkling of
mature workers and drones is everywhere visible. In eight or ten days
the new queen will be laying and the colony rapidly regaining its former
strength.
Meanwhile, the swarm is still in the air, every bee careering hither and
thither with no other apparent purpose than that of allowing full vent to
the mad excitement which has so mysteriously seized upon it. This state
will often last a considerable time, and, in rare cases, will end by the
bees trooping soberly back to the hive under just as mysterious a
revulsion of feeling and resuming their old steady work. At other times
the cloud of bees will suddenly rise high into the air and go straight
off across country, disappearing in a few moments from the keenest view.
But generally, after a short spell of this berserk frolic, the swarm
seems gradually to unite under common direction. The dark network of
flying bees overhead shrinks and grows denser. At last you make out the
beginnings of the cluster—a mere handful of bees clinging to a branch in
a tree or bush. The handful swells at a wonderful pace as the bees crowd
towards it from all quarters. In three or four minutes the whole
multitude is locked together in a solid pendent mass, and the wild song
of freedom has died down to a few stray intermittent notes.
This silence, following the shrill, abounding turmoil, has an almost
uncanny effect. It seems so utterly opposed to, and incongruous with,
the mad state of things that existed before; and it is difficult to
escape the conclusion that the bees have weakly given way to an
incontrollable impulse against all their principles and inherited
traditions of right, and that now, hanging thoroughly sobered and shamed
and disillusioned, homeless and beggared, they realise themselves face to
face with the unforeseen consequences of their thoughtless act. It is
just the conduct which might be expected of some savage human race, pent
up for long years in the rigid bounds of an alien civilisation, which in
one blind moment has thrown to the four winds all its irksome blessings,
only to realise, when the first glowing hour of freedom is over, that
their long captivity has made the old wild life no longer possible in
fact. Some such period of deep despondency as has come to the silent
swarm in the hedgerow can be imagined as inevitably falling on such a
race of men. But if the conquerors were to follow the absconding tribe
into the lean wilderness and bring them home again repentant, restoring
them to their old shelter and plenty once more, probably they would vent
their satisfaction in a chorus of joyful approval. And it is just this
which seems to be happening when the swarm is shaken down in front of a
new, well-furnished hive. The first bees that find their way into the
cool dark interior set up a jubilant hum unlike any other sound known in
beecraft. At once the strain is taken up by all the rest, and the whole
multitude marches into the new home to a tune which the least fanciful
must concede is nothing but sheer satisfaction melodised.
There is little in all this which suggests a race of creatures bound
within the hard and fast laws of an implanted instinct, which it is
neither in their power nor their pleasure to override. It is true that
in the natural life of the honey-bee this annually recurrent impulse of
swarming serves several necessary ends; but the utilitarian argument,
however stretched, cannot be made to explain the whole fact. There is
unmistakably an element of caprice about it—a kicking over the
traces—which would be natural enough in creatures possessed of reason,
but totally inconceivable from any other point of view. And the farther
we look into the whole problem the more perplexing it seems. If we grant
that the issue of a swarm, from a hive overcrowded and headed by a queen
past her prime, is a necessity, why is it that the same hive will often
swarm a second and even a third time until the stock is practically
extinguished and the original object of swarming wholly defeated? Or if,
under the same conditions, a hive prepares to swarm and cold windy
weather intervenes, how is it that frequently all idea of swarming is
abandoned for the season, although apparently the necessity for it
continues to exist?
Creatures which pursue a certain line of conduct under the blind
promptings of instinct could hardly be credited with intelligence enough
to lead them to seek another means for the desired end when the
preordained means has failed. But this is just what the honey-bee
appears to do in at least one instance. If the mother-bee of a colony is
getting past her work, and she cannot be sent off with a swarm in the
usual way, the bees will supersede her. They will deliberately put her
to death, and raise another queen to take her place. This State
execution of the old worn-out queens is one of the most curious and
pathetic things in or out of bee-life. One probe with a sting would
suffice in the matter; but the honey-bee is a great stickler for the
proprieties. The royal victim must be allowed to meet her fate in a
royal way; and she is killed by caresses, tight-locked in the joint
embrace of the executioners until suffocation brings about her death.
CHAPTER XIX
THE MIND IN THE HIVE
STUDENTS of the ways of the honey-bee find many things to marvel at, but
little to excite their wonder more than the unique system of ventilation
established in the hive.
Under natural conditions it is a moot point whether bees concern
themselves at all with the ventilation of their nests. Wild bees usually
fix upon a site for their dwelling where there is ample space for all
possible developments; and the ventilation of the home—as with most human
tenements—is left pretty much to chance causes. At least, in the course
of many years’ observation, the writer has never seen the fanners at work
in the entrance of a natural bee-settlement.
Probably this remarkable fanning system originated in a new want felt by
the bees, when, in remote ages, their domestication began, and they found
themselves cooped up in impervious hives which, in their very earliest
form, were possibly roughly-plaited baskets, daubed over with clay, or
earthen pots baked dry in the sun. This form, originally adopted by the
bee-keeper as a protection against honey-thieves of all sorts, as well as
against the weather, brought about a new order of things in bee-life.
The free circulation of air which would obtain when the bee-colony was
established naturally in a cleft of a rock or in a hollow tree became no
longer possible. And so—as they have been proved to have done in many
modern instances—the bees set to work to evolve new methods to meet new
necessities, and the present ventilation-system gradually became an
established habit of the race.
Watching a hive of bees on any hot summer’s day, one very curious, not to
say startling, fact must strike the most superficial observer. If the
fanning bees were stationed round the flight-hole in a merely casual,
irregular way, their obvious employment would be surprising enough. But
it is at once seen that each fanner forms part in an ingenious and
carefully thought-out plan. Outwardly, the fanners are arranged in
regular rows, one behind the other, all with their heads pointed towards
the hive, and all working their wings so fast that their incessant
movement becomes nearly invisible. These rows of bees extend sometimes
for several inches over the alighting-board, and on very hot days there
may be as many as seven or eight ranks. The ventilating army never
covers the whole available space. It is always at one side or the other;
or, where the entrance is a wide one, it may be divided into two wings,
leaving a centre space free. The fanning bees, moreover, do not keep
close together, but stand in open order, so that the continual coming and
going of the nectar-gatherers is in no wise impeded. There is a constant
flow of worker-bees through the ranks in both directions; yet the fanning
goes on uninterruptedly, and, under certain conditions, the current of
air thus set up may be strong enough to blow out the flame of a candle
held at the edge of the flight-board.
In all study of the ways of the honey-bee, the safer plan is to begin
with the assumption that a reasoning creature is under observation, and
then to work back to the surer, well-beaten tracks of thought concerning
the lower creation—that is, if the observed facts warrant it. But this
question of the ventilation of the modern beehive—only one of many other
problems equally astounding—helps the orthodox naturalist of the old
school very little on his comfortable way. We know that the wild bee
generally chooses a situation for her nest which is neither cramped nor
confined, but has in most cases ample space available for the future
growth of the colony. Security from storm or flood seems to be the first
consideration. The fact that the interior of a bee-nest is more or less
in darkness appears to be mainly accidental. Bees have no particular
liking for absolute darkness, nor, in fact, is any hive perfectly free
from light. Experiment will prove that a very small aperture is
sufficient to admit a considerable amount of reflected and diffused
light, quite enough for the needs of the hive. It may be supposed,
therefore, that the bees would have no objection to building in broad
daylight, or even sunlight, if, in conjunction with the first necessities
of shelter, security, and equable temperature, such a location were
easily obtainable under natural conditions. It would only be another
instance of their unique adaptability to circumstances forced upon them.
In the matter of ventilation, however, they seem to make a very
determined and highly successful stand against imposed conditions.
Bee-keeping cannot be made a profitable occupation unless the work of the
bees is kept strictly within certain sharply-defined limits, and probably
the modern movable comb hive is the best means to this end. That it
leaves the necessity of ventilation wholly unprovided for is not the
fault of the bee-master, but of the bees themselves. They refuse
pointblank to have anything to do with human notions of hygiene. Many
devices have been tried, in the form of vent-shafts and the like, to
carry off the vitiated air of the hive, but all have failed, because the
bees insist on stopping up every crack or crevice left in walls, roof, or
floor. For some inscrutable reason they will have only the one opening,
which must serve for all purposes, and the hive-maker has had to learn by
hard-won experience that the bees are right.
Perhaps, in any attempt to follow the reasoning of the bees in this
matter, it is well first of all to get rid of the word “fanning”
altogether. The wing-action of the ventilating bees is more that of a
screw-propeller than a fan. The air is not beaten to and fro, as a fan
would beat it, but is driven backwards, and thus the ventilating squadron
on the flight-board really sets up an exhaust-current, which draws the
contaminated air out of the hive. This implies an equally strong current
of fresh air passing into the hive, and explains why the bees work at the
side of the entrance only, the central, unoccupied space being obviously
the course of the intake. Thus the bees’ system of ventilation can be
described as a swiftly-flowing loop of air, having both extremities
outside the hive, much as a rope moves over a pulley, and it can be
readily understood that any supplementary inlet or outlet—such as the
bee-master would instal, if he were permitted—would be rather a hindrance
to the system than a help. Probably the actual main current keeps to the
walls of the hive throughout, the ventilation between the brood-combs
being more slowly effected. This would fulfil a double purpose. The air
supplied to the central portion, or brood-nest proper, would be
thoroughly warmed before it reached the young larva, while the outer and
upper combs, where the stores of new honey are maturing, would lie in the
full stream.
It must be remembered that a constant supply of fresh air of the right
temperature is as necessary for the brewing honey as it is for the bees
and young brood. The nectar, as gathered from the flowers, needs to be
deprived of the greater part of its moisture before it becomes honey.
Thus, in the course of the season, many gallons of water must pass out of
the hive in the form of vapour, and the removal of this water constitutes
an important part of the work of the ventilating army. Here, again, the
wisdom of the bees in insisting on a mechanical, as opposed to an
automatic, system of air-renewal, becomes evident. If the warm,
moisture-laden air were left to discharge itself from the hive by its own
buoyancy, condensation of this moisture would take place on the cooler
surfaces of the hive-walls, and the lower regions of the hive would
speedily become a quagmire. But by setting up a mechanically-driven
current the air is drawn out before condensation can take place, and
thus, in one operation, forming a veritable triumph in economics, the
hive interior is rendered both dry and salutary, while its temperature is
sustained at the necessary hatching-point for the young brood.
A reflection which will occur to most thinking minds is, why should the
domesticated honey-bee be constrained to resort to all these devices,
when the wild bee seems to lead a happy-go-lucky existence, comparatively
free, so far as we know, from such complicated cares? The answer to this
is that the science of apiculture has wrought a change in the bees’
normal environment which is probably without parallel in the whole
history of the domestication of the lower creatures. In a modern hive
the honey-bee lives on a vastly elaborated scale, and the ancient rules
of bee-life are no longer applicable. Much the same sort of thing has
happened as in the case of a village which has grown to a city. It is
useless to deal with the new order of things as a mere question of
arithmetic. Abnormal growth in a community involves change not only in
scale but in principle; and it is the same with a hive of bees as with a
hive of men.
CHAPTER XX
THE KING’S BEE-MASTER
STUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee—and perhaps there has been more
written about bees during the last two thousand years than of all other
creatures put together—do not quite know what to make of Moses Rusden,
who was Charles the Second’s bee-master, and wrote his “Further Discovery
of Bees” in the year 1679. The wonder about Rusden is that obviously he
knew so much that was true about bee-life, and yet seems, of set purpose,
to have imparted so little. He was a shrewdly observant man, of lifelong
experience in his craft. His system of bee-keeping would not have
disgraced many an apiculturist of the present time, often yielding him a
honey harvest averaging sixty pounds to the hive, which is a result not
always achieved even by our foremost apiarian scientists. His hives were
fitted with glass windows, through which he was continually studying his
bees. He must have had endless opportunities of proving the fallacy and
folly of the ancient classic notions as to bee-life. And yet we find him
gravely upholding almost the entire framework of fantastic error, old
even in Pliny’s time; and speaking of the king-bee with his generals,
captains, and retinue, honey that was a dew divinely sent down from
heaven, the miraculous propagation of bee-kind from the flowers, and all
the other curious myths and fables handed down from writer to writer
since the very earliest days.
But, reading on in the little time-stained, worm-eaten book, it is not
very difficult to guess at last why Rusden adopted this attitude. He was
the King’s bee-master, and therefore a courtier first and a naturalist
afterwards. In the first flush of the Restoration, anyone who had
anything to say in support of the divine right of kings was certain to
catch the Royal eye. Rusden admits himself conversant with Butler’s
“Feminine Monarchie,” published some fifty years before, in which the
writer argues that the single great bee in a hive was really a female.
To a man of Rusden’s practical experience and deductive quality of mind,
this statement must have lead, and no doubt did lead, to all sorts of
speculations and discoveries. But with a ruler of Charles the Second’s
temperament, feminine monarchies were not to be thought of. Rusden saw
at once his restrictions and his peculiar opportunity, and wrote his book
on bees, which is really an ingenious attempt to show that the system of
a self-ruling commonwealth is a violation of nature, and that, whether
for bees or men, government under a king is the divinely ordained state.
Whether, however, Rusden was deliberately insincere, or actually
succeeded in blinding himself conveniently for his own purposes, it must
be admitted not only that he argued the case with singular adroitness,
but that never did facts adapt themselves so readily to either conscious
or unconscious misrepresentation. In the glass-windowed hives of the
Royal bee-house at Saint James’s, he was able to show the King a nation
of creatures evidently united under a common rule, labouring together in
harmony and producing works little short of miraculous to the mediæval
eye. He saw that these creatures were of two sorts, each going about its
duty after its kind, but that in each colony there was one bee, and only
one, which differed entirely from the rest. To this single large bee all
the others paid the greatest deference. It was cared for and nourished,
and attended assiduously in its progress over the combs. All the humanly
approved tokens of royalty were manifest about it. No wonder the King’s
bee-master was not slow in recognising that, in those troublous times, he
could do his patron no greater service than by pointing out to the
superstitious and ignorant multitude—still looking askance at the
restored monarchy—such indisputable evidence in nature of Charles’s
parallel right.
And perhaps nature has never been at such pains to conceal her true
processes from the vulgar eye as in this case of the honey-bee. If
Rusden ever suspected that the one large bee in each colony was really
the mother of all the rest, and had set himself to prove it, he would
have found the whole array of visible facts in opposition to him. If
ever a truth seemed established beyond all reasonable doubt, it was that
the ordinary male-and-female principle, pertaining throughout the rest of
creation, was abrogated in the single instance of the honey-bee. The
ancients explained this anomaly as a special gift from the gods, and the
bees were supposed to discover the germs of bee-life in certain kinds of
flowers and to bring them home to the cells for development. Rusden
improved upon this idea by assigning to his king-bee the duty of
fertilising these embryos when they were placed in the cells, for he
could not otherwise explain a fact of which he was perfectly well
aware—that the large bee travelled the combs unceasingly, thrusting its
body into each cell in turn. Rusden also held that the worker-bees were
females, but only—as Freemasons would say—in a speculative manner. They
neither laid eggs nor bore young. Their maternal duties consisted only
in gathering the essence of bee-life from the blossoms and nursing and
tending the young bees when they emerged from their cradle-cells. The
drones were a great difficulty to Rusden. To admit them to be males—as
some held even in his day—would have been against the declared object of
his book, as tending to entrench upon royal prerogatives. Luckily, this
truth was as easy of apparent refutation as all the rest. No one had
ever detected any traffic of the sexes amongst bees either in or out of
the hives; nor, indeed, is such detection possible. The fact that the
queen-bee has concourse with the drone only once in her whole life, and
that their meeting takes place in the upper air far out of reach of human
observation, is knowledge only of yesterday. In Rusden’s time such a
marvel was never even suspected. As the drones, therefore, were never
seen to approach the worker bees or to notice them in any way, and as
also young bees were bred in the hives during many months when no drones
existed at all, Rusden’s ingenuity was equal to the task of bringing them
into line with his theory.
If he had lived a few decades earlier, and it had been Cromwell, instead
of the heartless, middle-aged rake of a sovereign, whom he had to
propitiate, no doubt Rusden would have asked his public to swallow
Pliny’s whole apiarian philosophy at a gulp. Bee-life would then have
been held up as a foreshadowing of celestial conditions, and the facts
would have lent themselves to this view equally as well. But his task
was to represent the economy of the hive as a clear proof of divine
authority in kingship, and it must be conceded that, as far as knowledge
went in those days, he established his case.
His book was published under the ægis of the Royal Society, and “by his
Majestie’s especial Command,” which was less a testimony of the King’s
love for natural history than of his political astuteness. Apart,
however, from its peculiar mission, the book is interesting as a
sidelight on the old bee-masters and their ways. Probably it represents
very fairly the extent of knowledge at the time, which had evidently
advanced very little since the days of Virgil. Rusden taught, with the
ancients, that honey was a secretion from the stars, and that wax was
gathered from the flowers, as well as the generative matter before
mentioned. He had one theory which seems to have been essentially his
own. The little lumps of many-coloured pollen, which the worker-bees
fetch home so industriously in the breeding season, he held to be the
actual substance of the young bees to come, in an elementary state.
These, he tells us, were placed in the cells, having absorbed the
feminine virtues from their bearers on the way. The king-bee then
visited each in turn, vivifying them with his essence, after which they
had nothing to do but grow into perfect bees. He got over the difficulty
of the varying sexes of the bees bred in a hive by asserting that these
lumps of animable matter were created in the flowers, either female, or
neuter—as he called the drones—or royal, as the case might be. Having
denied the drones any part in the production of their species, or in
furnishing the needs of the hive, Rusden was hard put to it to find a use
for them in a system where it would have been _lèse-majesté_ to suppose
anything superfluous or amiss. He therefore hits upon an idea which,
curiously enough, embodies matter still under dispute at the present
time, although it is being slowly recognised as a truth. Rusden says the
use of the drones is to take the place of the other bees in the hive when
these are mostly away honey-gathering. Their great bodies act as so many
warming stoves, supplying the necessary heat to the hatching embryos and
the maturing stores of honey. It is well known that drones gather
together side by side, principally in the remoter parts of the hive,
often completely covering these outer combs. They seldom rouse from
their lethargy of repletion to take their daily flight until about
midday, when most of the ingathering work is over, and the hive is again
fairly populous with worker-bees. Probably, therefore, Rusden was quite
right in his theory, which, hundreds of years after, is only just
beginning to be accepted as a fact.
CHAPTER XXI
POLLEN AND THE BEE
POPULAR beliefs as to the ways of the honey-bee, unlike those relating to
many other insects, are surprisingly accurate, so far as they go. But,
dealing with such a complex thing as hive-life, it is well-nigh
impossible to have understanding on any single point without going very
much farther than the ordinary tabloid-method of knowledge can carry us.
This is especially true with regard to pollen, and the uses to which it
is put within the hive. The hand-books on bee-keeping usually tell us
that pollen is employed with honey as food for the young bees when in the
larval state; but this is so wide a generalisation that it amounts to
almost positive error.
[Picture: “A rarity in hive life: a honeycomb built upward”]
As a matter of fact, the pollen in its raw condition is given only to the
drone-larva, and this only towards the end of its life as a grub. For
the first three days of the drone-larva’s existence, and in the case of
the young worker-bee for the whole five days of the larval period, the
pollen is administered by the nurse-bees in a pre-digested state. After
partial assimilation, both the pollen and the nectar are regurgitated by
these nurse-bees, and form together a pearly-white fluid—veritable
bee-milk—on which the young grubs thrive in an extraordinary way.
There are few things more fascinating than to watch a hive of bees at
work on a fine June morning, and to note how the pollen is carried in.
With a prosperous stock, thousands of bees must pass within the space of
a few minutes, each bee dragging behind her a double load of this
substance. Very often, in addition to the half-globes of pollen which
she carries on her thighs, the bee will be smothered in it from head to
foot, as in gold-dust. If you track her into the hive, one curious point
will be noted. No matter how fast she may go, or what frantic spirit of
labour may possess the entire colony, the pollen-laden bee is never in a
hurry to get rid of her load. She will waste precious time wandering
over the crowded combs, continually shaking herself, as though showing
off her finery to her admiring relatives; and it may be some minutes
before she finally selects a half-filled pollen-cell and proceeds to kick
off her load. The different kinds of pollen are packed into the cells
indiscriminately, the bee using her head as a ram to press each pellet
home. When the cell is full it is never sealed over with a waxen
capping, as in the case of the honey-stores, but is left open or covered
with a thin film of honey, apparently to preserve it from the air. The
nurse-bees, who are the young workers under a fortnight old, help
themselves from these pollen-bins. They also frequently stop a
pollen-bearer as she hurries through the crowd, and nibble the pollen
from her thighs.
Throughout the season there is hardly an imaginable colour or shade of
colour which is not represented in the pollen carried into a beehive; and
with the aid of a microscope it is not difficult to identify the source
of each kind. In May, before the great field-crops have come into bloom,
the pollen is almost entirely gathered from wild flowers, and consists of
various rich shades of yellow and brown. By far the heaviest burdens at
this time are obtained from the dandelion. The pollen from this flower
is a peculiarly bright orange, and is easily recognised under a strong
glass by its grains, which are in the form of regular dodecahedrons,
thickly covered all over with short spikes.
It is well known that the honey-bee confines herself during each journey
to one species of flower, and this is proved by the microscope. It is
not easy to intercept a homing bee laden with pollen. On alighting
before the hive she runs in so quickly that the keenest eye and deftest
hand are necessary to effect her capture. But with the aid of a
miniature butterfly-net and a little practice it can generally be done;
and then the pellet of pollen will be found to consist almost invariably
of one kind of grain. But it is not always so. The honey-bee, as a
reasoning creature, does not and cannot be expected to do anything
invariably. Among some hundreds of these pollen-lumps examined under the
microscope I have occasionally found grains of pollen differing from the
bulk. Perhaps there are no two species of flower which have
pollen-grains exactly alike in colour, shape, and size, and in most the
differences are very striking. In the cases mentioned the bulk of the
pollen was made up of long oval yellow grains divided lengthwise into
three lobes or gores, which were easily identifiable as coming from the
figwort. The isolated grains were very minute spheres thickly studded
with blunt spikes—obviously from the daisy. The figwort is a famous
source of bee-provender in spring time, and its pollen can be seen
flowing into the hives at that time in an almost unbroken stream of
brilliant chrome-yellow. The brownish-gold masses that are also being
constantly carried in are from the willow; and where the hives are near
woodlands the bluebells yield the bees enormous quantities of pollen of a
dull yellowish white.
It is interesting that all these various materials, so carefully kept
asunder when gathered, are for the most part inextricably mingled within
the hive. Obviously the system of visiting only one species of flower on
each foraging journey can have no relation to pollen-gathering; nor does
it seem to apply to the nectar obtained at the same time. It cannot be
inferred that the contents of each honey-cell are brewed from only one
source, because it has been proved that bees do blend the various nectars
together when several crops are simultaneously in flower. A honey-judge
can easily detect the flavours of heather and white-clover in the same
sample of honey by taste alone. But there is another and much more
conclusive way of deciding the source from which a particular sample of
honey has been obtained. In the purest and most mature honeys there are
always a few accidental grains of pollen, invisible to the eye, yet
easily detected under a strong glass. And these may be taken as almost
infallible guides to the species of flowers visited by the foraging bees.
The only explanation which seems possible, therefore, of the honey-bee’s
care to visit only one kind of blossom on each journey is that it is done
for the sake of the plant itself, cross-fertilisation being thus rendered
extremely improbable.
When once the bee-man has succumbed to the fascination of the microscope,
there is very little chance that he will ever return to his old panoramic
view of things. He goes on from wonder to wonder, and the horizon of the
new world he has entered continually broadens with each marvelling step.
To the old rule-of-thumb bee-keepers pollen was mere bee-bread; and the
fact that the bees preferred one kind to another did not greatly concern
them. But at a time when the small-holder is beginning to feel his feet,
and the question of the feasibility of planting for bee-forage is certain
to arise, it is necessary to know why bees gather this important part of
their diet from particular kinds of flowers, while leaving severely alone
others which appear to be equally attractive. To this question the
microscope supplies a sufficient answer.
Chemists have determined that nectar is the heat and force-producer in
the food of the bee, while pollen supplies its nitrogenous
tissue-building qualities. It is evident that bees select certain
pollens for their superior nutritive powers, just as in bread-making we
prefer wheat to any other species of grain. In the kinds of pollen most
in favour with bees a good microscope will reveal the fact that the
pollen-grains are often accompanied by a certain amount of true farina,
as well as essential oils, which must greatly enhance their food-value.
And in those crops generally neglected by bees, such as daisies and
buttercups, those accompaniments appear to be absent. The dandelion is
especially rich in a thick yellow oil, which the bees carry away with the
pollen; while two plants in particular of which the bees are especially
fond—the crocus and the box—have a large amount of this farina mingled
with the true pollen.
It is only within the last century or so that the real uses of pollen in
the economy of the hive have been ascertained. Until comparatively
recent times the pollen was supposed to be crude wax, which the bees
refined and purified into the white ductile material of the new combs;
and a few old-fashioned bee-keepers still hold this view, and refuse to
believe that the wax used in comb-building is entirely a secretion from
the bee’s own body. Pollen, indeed, seems to have very little to do with
wax, hardly any nitrogenous food being consumed while the wax is being
generated.
CHAPTER XXII
THE HONEY-FLOW
ON Warrilow Bee-Farm, where it lay under the green lip of the Sussex
Downs, there was always food for wonder, whether the year was at its ebb
or its flow. But in July of a good season the busy life of the farm
reached a culminating point.
The ordinary man, in search of excitement, distraction, the heady wine
served out only to those who stand in the fighting-line of the world,
would hardly seek these things in a little sleepy village sunk fathoms
deep in English summer greenery. But, nevertheless, with the coming of
the great honey-flow to Warrilow came all these subtle human necessities.
If you would keep up with the bee-master and his men at this stirring
time, you must be ready for a break-neck gallop from dawn to dusk of the
working day, and often a working night to follow. While the honey-flow
endured, muscles and nerves were tried to their breaking-point. It was a
race between the great centrifugal honey-extractor and the toiling
millions of the hives; and time and again, in exceptionally favourable
seasons, the bees would win; the honey-chambers would clog with the
interminable sweets, and the dreaded atrophy of contentment would seize
upon the best of the hives, with the result that they would gather no
more honey.
A week of hot bright days and warm still nights, with here and there a
gentle shower to hearten the fields of clover and sainfoin; and then the
fight between the bee-master and his millions would begin in earnest.
There would be no more quiet pipes, strolling and talking among the
hives: the Bee-Master of Warrilow was a general now, with all a great
commander’s stern absorption in the conduct of a difficult campaign.
Often, with the first grey of the summer’s morning, you would hear his
footsteps on the red-tiled path of the garden below, as he hurried off to
the bee-farm, and presently the bell in the little turret over the
extracting-house would clang out a reveille to his men, and draw them
from their beds in the neighbouring village to another day of work,
perhaps the most trying work by which men win their bread.
It is nothing in the ordinary way to lift a super-chamber weighing twenty
pounds or so. But to lift it by imperceptible degrees, place an empty
rack in its place, return the full rack to the hive as an upper story,
and to do it all so quietly and gently that the bees have not realised
the onslaught on their home until the operation is complete, is quite
another thing. And a long day of this wary, delicate handling of heavy
weights, at arm’s length, under broiling sunshine, is one of the most
nerve-wearing and back-breaking experiences in the world.
One of the mistakes made by the unknowing in bee-craft is that the
bee-veil is never used among professional men. But the truth is that
even the oldest, most experienced hand is glad enough, at times, to fall
back behind this, his last line of defence. All depends upon the
momentary temper of the bees. There are times when every hive on the
farm is as gentle as a flock of sheep, and it is possible to take any
liberty with them. At other times, and apparently under much the same
conditions, stocks of bees with the steadiest of reputations will resent
the slightest interference, while the mere approach to others may mean a
furious attack. No true bee-man is afraid of the wickedest bees that
ever flew, but it is only the novice who will disdain necessary
precautions. Even the Bee-Master of Warrilow was seldom seen without a
wisp of black net round the crown of his ancient hat, ready to be let
down at a moment’s notice if the bees showed any inclination to sting.
[Picture: “The upward built comb shown joined on the downward built
comb”]
In a long vista of memorable days spent at Warrilow, one stands out clear
above all the rest. It was in July of a famous honey-year. The hay had
long been carried, and the second crops of sainfoin and Dutch clover were
making their bravest show of blossom in the fields. It was a stifling
day of naked light and heat, with a fierce wind abroad hotter even than
the sunshine. The deep blue of the sky came right down to the
earth-line. The farthest hills were hard and bright under the universal
glare. And on the bee-farm, as I came through the gap in the dusty
hedgerow, I saw that every man had his veil close drawn down. The
bee-master hailed me from his crowded corner.
“Y’are just to the nick!” he called, in his broadest Sussex. “’Tis
stripping-day wi’ us, an’ I can do wi’ a dozen o’ ye! Get on your veil,
d’rectly-minute, an’ wire in t’ot!”
The fierce hot wind surged through the little city of hives, scattering
the bees like chaff in all directions, and rousing in them a wild-cat
fury. Overhead the sunny air was full of bees, striving out and home;
and from every hive there came a shrill note, a tremulous, high-pitched
roar of work, half-baffled, driven through against all odds and
hindrances, a note that bore in upon you an irresistible sense of fear.
I pulled on the bee-veil without more ado.
“Stripping-day” was always the hardest day of the year at Warrilow. It
meant that some infallible sign of the approaching end of the harvest had
been observed, and that all extractable honey must be immediately removed
from the hives. A change of weather was brewing, as the nearness of the
hills foretold. There might be weeks of flood and tempest coming, when
the hives could not be opened. Overnight there had been a ringed moon,
and the morning broke hot and boisterous, with an ominous clearness
everywhere. By midday the glass was tumbling down. The bee-master took
one look at it, then called all hands together. “Strip!” he said
laconically; and all work in extracting-house and packing-sheds was
abandoned, and every man braced himself to the job.
The hives were arranged in long double rows, back to back, with a footway
between wide enough to allow the passage of the honey barrow. This was
not unlike a baker’s hand-cart, and contained empty combs, which were to
be exchanged for the full combs from the hives. I found myself sharing a
row with the bee-master, and already infused with the glowing, static
energy for which he was renowned. The process of stripping the hives
varied little with each colony, but the bees themselves furnished variety
enough and to spare. In working for comb-honey, the racks or sections
are tiered up one above the other until as many as five stories may be
built over a good stock. But where the honey is to be extracted from the
comb another system is followed. There is then only one super-chamber,
holding ten frames side by side, and these frames are removed separately
as fast as the bees fill and seal them, their place being taken by the
empty combs extracted the day before.
The whole art of this work consists in disturbing the bees as little as
possible. At ordinary times the roof of the hive is removed, the
“quilts” which cover the comb-frames are then very gently peeled away,
and the frames with their adhering bees are placed side by side in the
clearing-box. The honey-chamber is then furnished with empty combs, and
the coverings and roof replaced. On nine days out of ten this can be
done without a veil or any subduing contrivance; and the bees which were
shut up with the honey in the clearing-box will soon come out through the
traps in the lid and fly back to their hives. But when time presses, and
several hundred hives must be gone through in a few hours, a different
system is adopted. Speed is now a main desideratum in the work, and on
stripping-day at Warrilow resort is made to a contrivance seldom seen
there at other times. This is simply a square of cloth saturated with
weak carbolic acid, the most detested, loathsome thing in bee-comity.
Directly the comb-frames are laid bare these cloths are drawn over them,
and in a few moments every bee has crowded down terror-stricken into the
lower regions of the hive, leaving the honey-chamber free for instant and
swift manipulation.
CHAPTER XXIII
SUMMER LIFE IN A BEE-HIVE
IF you go to the bee-garden early of a fine summer’s morning you will be
struck by the singular quiet of the place. All the woods and hedgerows
are ringing with busy life. The rooks are cawing homeward with already
hours of strenuous work behind them. The cattle in the meadows are well
through their first cud. But as yet the bee-city is as still as the
sleeping village around it. Now and again a bee drops down from the sky
on a deserted hive-threshold with sleepy hum, and runs past the guards at
the gate. But these are bees that have wandered too far afield
overnight, tempted by the sunny warmth of the evening. The dusk has
caught them, and obliterated their flying-marks. They have perforce
camped out under some broad leaf, to be wakened by the earliest light of
morning and hurry home with their belated loads.
The sun is well up over the hillbrow before the visible life of the
bee-garden begins to rouse in earnest. The water-seekers are the first
to appear. Every hive has its traditional dipping-place, generally the
oozy margin of some neighbouring pond, where the house-martins have been
wheeling and crying since the first grey of dawn. Now the bees’ clear
undertone begins to mingle with the chippering chorus. In a little while
there is a thin straight line of humming music stretched between the
hives and the pond: it could not be straighter if a surveyor had made it
with his level. Again a little while, and this long searchlight of
melody thrown out by the bee-garden veers to the north. You may track it
straight over copse and meadow, seeing not a bee overhead, but guided
unerringly by the arrow-flight of music, until, on the far hillside, it
is lost in a perfect roar of sound. Here the white-clover is in almost
full blossom again: in southern England at least it is always the second
crop of clover that yields the most plentiful harvest to the hives.
It must be a disturbing thing to those kindergarten moralists who hold
the bee up to youth for an example of industry and prudence to learn that
she is by no means an early riser; though, at this time of year, she is
undoubtedly both wealthy and wise. For it is her very wisdom that now
makes her a lie-abed. When the iron is hot, she will not be slow in
striking. But it is nectar, not dewdrops, from which she makes her
honey. Very wisely she waits until the sun has drunk up the dew from the
clover-bells, and then she hurries forth to garner their undiluted
sweets. Even then, perhaps, three-fourths of her burden will be carried
uselessly. In the brewing-vats of the hive the nectar must stand and
steam until three parts of its original bulk has evaporated, and its
sugar has been inverted into grape-sugar. Then it is honey, but not
before. When we see the fanning-army at work by the entrance of a hive,
it is not alone an undoubted passion for pure air that moves the bees to
such ingenious activity. In the height of the honey season many pints of
vaporised liquid must be given off by the maturing stores in the course
of a day and night, and all this water must be got rid of. Herein is
shown the wisdom of the bee-master who makes the walls of his hives of a
material that is a bad conductor of heat. It is a first necessity of
health to the bees that the moisture in the air, which they are
incessantly fanning out at this time, should not condense until it is
safely wafted from the hive. A cold-walled hive can easily become a
quagmire.
The bee-garden is quiet now in the sweet virgin light of the summer’s
morning; but the thought of it as containing so many houses of sleep,
true of the village with its thatched human dwellings, could not well be
farther from the truth in regard to the village of hives. There is
little sleep in a bee-hive in summer. Of any common period of rest, of
any quiet night when all but the sentinels at the gate are slumbering, of
any general time of relaxation, there is absolutely none. Each
individual bee—forager or nurse, comb-builder or storekeeper—works until
she can work no more, and then stops by the way, or crawls into the
nearest empty cell for a brief siesta. But the life of the hive itself
never halts, never wavers in summertime, night or day. Go to it morning,
noon, or night in the hot July season, and you will always find it
driving onward unremittingly. The crowd is surging to and fro. There is
ever the busy deep labour-note. Its people are building, brewing,
wax-making, scavenging, wet-nursing, being born and dying: it is all
going on without pause or break inside those four reverberating walls,
while you stand without in the dew-soaked grass and level sunbeams
wondering how it is that all the world can be at full flood-tide of merry
life and music while these mysterious hive people give scarce a sign.
It is at night chiefly that the combs are built. The wax, that is a
secretion from the bees’ own bodies, will generate only under great heat,
and the temperature of the hive is naturally greatest when all the family
is at home. In the night also such works as transferring a large mass of
honey from one comb to another are undertaken. It is curious to note
that at night time the drones get together in the remotest parts of the
hive, apparently to keep up the heat in these distant quarters, which are
away from the main cluster of worker-bees. There is hardly another thing
in creation, perhaps, with a worse name than the drone-bee. But like all
bad things he is not so bad as he is represented. Apart from his main
and obvious use, the drone fulfils at least one very important office.
His habit is not to leave his snug corner until close upon midday. Thus,
when every able-bodied worker bee is out foraging, the temperature of the
hive is sustained by the presence of the drones, and the young bee-brood
is in no danger of chilling.
Though the supreme direction of all affairs in a bee-hive falls to the
lot of the worker-bees, the queen-mother is second to none in industry.
At this time of year she goes about her task with a dogged patience and
assiduity pathetic to witness. She may have to supply from two thousand
to three thousand brood-cells with eggs in the course of a single day,
and she is for ever wandering through the crowded corridors of the hive
looking for empty cradles. The old bee-masters believed that the queen
was always accompanied in these unending promenades by exactly a dozen
bees, whom they called the Twelve Apostles. It is true that whenever the
queen stops in her march she is immediately surrounded by a number of
bees, who form themselves into a ring, keeping their heads ceremoniously
towards her. But close observation reveals the fact that the queen-bee
is never followed about by a permanent retinue. When she moves to go on,
the ring breaks and disperses before her; but the bees who gather round
her on her next halt are those who happen to occupy the space of comb she
has then reached.
The truth seems to be that she is passed from “hand to hand” over the
combs of the brood-nest, and is stopped wherever a cell requires
replenishing. Each bee that she encounters on her path turns front and
touches her gently with her antenna. The queen constantly returns these
salutes as she moves, and it looks exactly as if she were going the
rounds of her domain and collecting information. Often she is stopped by
half a dozen bees in a solid phalanx, and carefully headed off in a new
direction. She looks into every cell as she goes, and when she has
lowered her body into a cell, the Apostles instantly gather about her,
with strokings and caresses. But their number is seldom twelve. It
varies according to the bulk and length of the queen herself, and is more
often sixteen than a dozen.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE YELLOW PERIL IN HIVELAND
IN the hedgerow that surrounds the bee-garden the wrens and robins have
been singing all the morning long. Still a few pale sulphur buds remain
on the evening-primroses. The balsams make a glowing patch of magenta by
the garden gate. Over the door porch of the old thatched cottage purple
clematis climbs bravely; and the nasturtiums still flaunt their scarlet
and gold in the sunny angle of the wall. But, for all the colour and the
music, the hot sun, and the serene blue air overhead, you can never
forget that it is October. If the towering elm-trees by the lane-side
showed no fretting of amber in their greenery, nor the beeches sent down
their steady rain of russet, there would still be one indubitable mark of
the season—the voice of the hives themselves.
Rich and wavering and low in the sweet autumn sunlight, it comes over to
you now with the very spirit of rest in every halting tone. There is
work, of a kind, doing in the bee-garden. A steady tide of bees is
stemming out from and home to every hive. But there is none of the press
and busy clamour of bygone summer days. It is only a make-believe of
duty. Each bee, as she swings up into the sunshine, hovers a while
before setting easy sail for the ivy in the lane; and, on returning, she
may bask for whole minutes together on the hot hive-roof. There is no
sort of hurry; little as there may be to do abroad, there is less at
home.
But to one section of the bee-community, these slack October hours bring
no cessation of toil. The guards at the gate must redouble their
vigilance. Cut off from most of their natural supplies, the yellow
pirates—the wasps—are continually prowling about the entrance; and, in
these lean times, will dare all dangers for a fill of honey. Incessant
fierce skirmishes take place on the alighting-board. The guards hurl
themselves at each adventuress in turn. The wasp, calculating coward
that she is, invariably declines battle, and makes off; but only to
return a little later, hoping for the unwary moment that is sure to come.
While the whole strength of the picket is engaged with other would-be
pilferers, she slips round the scuffling crew, and plunges into the
fragrant gloom of the hive.
The variation in temperament among the members of a bee-colony is never
better illustrated than by the way in which these marauders are received
and dealt with. The wasp never tries to pick a way to the honey-stores
through the close packed ranks of the bees. She keeps to the sides of
the hive, and works her way up by a series of quick darts whenever a path
opens before her. Evidently her plan is to avoid contact with the
home-keeping bees, which, at this time of year, have little more to do
than loiter over the combs, or tuck themselves away in the empty
brood-cells by the hour together. But in her desultory advance, she
often cannons against single bees; and then she may be either mildly
interrogated, fiercely challenged, or may be allowed to pass with a
friendly stroke of the antennæ, as though she were an orthodox member of
the hive. Again, you may see her recognised for a stranger by three or
four workers simultaneously. She will be surrounded and closely
questioned. The bees draw back and confer among themselves in obvious
doubt. The wasp knows better than to await the result of their
deliberations; by the time they look for her again, she is gone.
She carries her life in her hand, and well she knows it. The farther she
goes, the more suspicious and menacing the bees become. Now she has wild
little scuffles here and there with the boldest of them, but her superior
adroitness and pace save her at every turn. It is about an even wager
that she will reach the brimming honey-cells, load herself up to the
chin, and escape home to her paper-stronghold with her spoils.
As often as not, however, these hive-robbing wasps pay the last great
price for their temerity. Those who study bee-life closely and
unremittingly, year after year, find it difficult to escape the
conclusion that there are certain bees in the crowd who are mentally and
physically in advance of their sisters. The notion of the old
bee-keepers—that there were generals and captains as well as
rank-and-file in the hive—seems, in fact, to be not entirely without
latter-day confirmation. And it is just the chance of falling in with
one of these bees that constitutes, for the wasp, the main risk when
robbing the hives.
If this happens, there is no longer any doubt of the turn affairs are to
take. At an unlucky moment the wasp brushes against one of these
hive-constables and instead of indifference, or, at most, a spiteful
tweak of the leg or wing in passing, she finds herself suddenly at deadly
grips. The bee’s attack is as swift as it is furious. Seizing the
yellow honey-thief with all six legs, she hacks away at her with her
jaws, at the same time curving her body inwards with her cruel sting
bared to the hilt. Even now, although more than equal to one bee at any
time, the policy of the wasp is to refuse the fight, and to run. Her
long legs give her a better reach. She forces her adversary away,
disengages, and charges off towards the dim light of the entrance.
In all that follows, this is the beacon that guides her. If she could
get a clear course, her greater speed would soon out-distance all
pursuit. But the sudden clash of arms in the quiet of the hive has an
extraordinary effect on the sluggish colony. The alarm spreads on every
side. Wherever the wasp runs now she is met with snapping jaws and
detaining embraces. As she rushes madly down the comb, she is
continually pulled up in full flight by bees hanging on to her legs, her
wings, her black waving antenna. A dozen times she shakes them all off,
and speeds on, the spot of light and safety in the distance ever growing
brighter and larger. But she seldom escapes with her life if affairs
have reached this pass. The way now is alive with enemies. She is
stopped and headed off in all directions. Trying this way and that for a
loophole, she finally gives it up and turns on her tracks, bewildered and
panic-stricken, only to rush straight into the midst of more foes.
The end is always the same. Another of the stalwarts spies her, and in a
moment the two are locked in berserk conflict. Together they drop down
between the combs and thud to the bottom of the hive. Here it is hard to
tell what happens. The fight is so fierce and sharp, and the two whirl
round and tumble over and over together so wildly that you can make out
little else than a spinning blur of brown and yellow. A great bright
drop of honey flies off: in her extremity the wasp has disgorged her
spoils. Perhaps for an instant the warriors may get wedged up in a
corner, and then you may see that they are not lunging at random with
their stilettos, but each is trying for a side-thrust on the body; these
mail-clad creatures are vulnerable to each other only at one point—the
spiracles, or breathing-holes. Often the wasp deals the first fatal
blow, and the bee drops off mortally hurt. She may even dispose of three
or four of her assailants thus in quick succession. But each time
another bee closes with her at once. For the wasp there can only be one
end to it. Sooner or later she gets the finishing stroke.
And then there follows a grim little comedy. The bee, torn and ragged as
she is from the incessant gnashing of those razor-edged yellow jaws,
nevertheless pauses not a moment. She grips her dying adversary by the
base of the wing, and struggles off with her towards the entrance of the
hive. It is a hard job, but she succeeds at last. Alternately pushing
her burden before her, or dragging it behind, at length she wins out into
the open, and, with a final desperate effort, tumbles the wasp over the
edge of the footboard down into the grass below. Yet this is not enough.
The victory must be celebrated in the old warrior fashion. Rent and
bleeding and exhausted as she is, she finds she can still fly. And up
into the mellow sunbeams of the October morning she sweeps, giddily and
uncertainly, piercing the air with her shrill song of triumph. Through
the murmurous quiet of the bee-garden, it rings out like a cry in the
night.
CHAPTER XXV
THE UNBUSY BEE
IT is well-nigh two months now since the hives were packed down for the
winter, and the bees are flying as thick as on many a summer’s day.
[Picture: “The Guardian of the Hives”]
Yet no one could mistake their flight for the summer flight. It is not
the straight-away eager rush up into the blue vault of the sunny
morning—high away over hedgerow and village roof-top towards the
clover-fields, whitening the far-off hillside with their tens of
thousands of honey-brimming bells. It is rather the vagrant, purposeless
hanging-about of an habitually busy people forced to make holiday.
Through it all there runs the pathetic interest in trifles, half-hearted
and wholly artificial, that you see among the lolling crowd of men when a
great strike is on—the thoughtful kicking at odd pebbles;
stride-measuring on the flag-stones; little vortices of excitement got up
over minute incidents that would otherwise pass unnoticed; the earnest
flagellation of memory over past happenings more trivial still.
Thus the bees idle about and wander, on this still November morning,
doing just the things you would never expect a bee to do. The greater
number of them merely take long desultory reaches a-wing through the
sunshine, going off in one objectless direction, turning about at the end
of a few yards with just as little apparent reason, coming back to the
hive at length on no more obvious errand than that, where there is
nothing to do, doing it in another place bears at least the semblance of
achievement.
But many of them succeed in conjuring up an almost ludicrous assumption
of business. One comes driving out of the hive-entrance at a great pace,
designedly, as you would think, going out of her way to bustle the few
bees lounging there, as if the entrance-board were still thronged with
the streaming crowd of summer days foregone. She stops an instant to rub
her eyes clear of the hive-darkness; tries her wings a little to make
sure of their powers for a heavy load; then, with a deep note like the
twang of a guitar-string, launches out into the sun-steeped air. But it
is all a vain pretence, and well she knows it. Watch her as she flies,
and you will see her busy ding-dong pace slacken a dozen yards away. She
fetches a turn or two above the leafless apple-branches of the garden,
with the rest of the chanting, workless crew. She may presently start
off again at a livelier speed than ever, as though vexed at being
allured, even for a moment, from the duty that calls her away to the
mist-clad hill. But it always ends in the same fashion. A little later
she is fluttering down on the threshold of the silent hive, and running
busily in, keeping up the transparent fiction, you see, to the last.
_An Officious Dame_
Many more set themselves to look for sweets where they must know there is
little likelihood of finding any. Scarce one goes near the glowing belt
of pompons rimming the garden on every side. But here is one bee, an
ancient dame, with ragged wings and shiny thorax, poised outside a cranny
in the old brick wall, and examining it with serious, shrill inquiry.
She is obviously making-believe, to while away the time, that it is a
choice blossom full of nectar. She knows it is nothing of the kind; but
that will neither check her ardour nor expedite the piece of play-acting.
She spins it out to the utmost, and leaves the one dusty crevice at last
only to go through the same performance at the next.
I often wonder wherein lies the fascination to a hive-bee of an open
window or door. Sitting here ledgering in the little office of the
bee-farm—where no honey, nor the smell of honey, is ever allowed to
come—sooner or later, in the quiet of the golden morning, the familiar
voice peals out. It is startling at first, unless you are well used to
it—this sudden high-pitched clamour breaking the silence about you; and
the oldest bee-man must lay down pen or rule, and look up from his work
to scan the intruder.
She has darted in at the door, and has stopped in mid-air a foot or two
within the room. The sound she makes is very different from that of a
bee in ordinary flight. You cannot mistake its meaning; it is one
long-drawn-out, musical note of exclamation, an intense, reiterated
wonder at all about her—the subdued light, the walls covered with
book-shelves, the littered table, and the vast wingless, drab-coloured
creature sitting in the midst of it all, like a funnel-spider in his
snare. Bees entering a room in this way seldom stop more than a second
or two, and, more rarely still, alight. As a rule, they are gone the
next moment as swiftly as they came, leaving the impression that their
quick retreat was due to a sudden accession of fear; just as children,
venturing into some dark unwonted place, at first boldly enough, will
suddenly turn tail and flee, with terror hard upon their heels.
But what should bring bees into such unlikely situations during these
warm bright breaks in the wintry weather, when they seldom or never
venture out of the range of hives and fields in the season of plenty? It
would be curious to know whether people who have never kept bees, nor
handled hives, are habitually pried upon in this way; or whether it is
only among bee-men the thing occurs. Naturalists are commonly agreed
that bees possess an extraordinary sense of smell; indeed, the fact is
patent to all who know anything of hive-life. Now, years of stinging
render the bee-master immune to the ordinary results of a prod from a
bee’s acid-charged stiletto. There is only a sharp prick, a little
irritation at the moment, but seldom any after-effects of swelling or
inflammation, local or general. But all this injection of formic acid
under the skin year after year might very well have a cumulative effect,
so that the much-stung bee-man would eventually acquire in his own person
the permanent odour of the hive. And this, scented afar off, may well be
the attraction that brings these roving scrutineers to places having, in
themselves, no sort of interest to the winged hive-people.
_The Perils of_ “_Immunity_”
The mention of stinging brings back a thought that has often occurred to
me. Do lovers of honey ever quite realise the price that must be paid
before their favourite sweet is there for them on the breakfast-table,
filling the room with the mingled perfume from a whole countryside? It
is easy to talk of immunity from the effect of bee-stings; but the truth
is that this immunity means, for the bee-master, no more than power to go
on with his work in spite of the stinging. And this power is not a
permanent one. It is brought about by incessant pricks from the living
poisoned needle; the ordeal must be continuous, or the immunity will soon
pass away. Over-care in handling bees is good only up to a certain
point. The bee-man who, by continual practice, has brought this gentlest
art to its highest perfection, so that he can do what he likes with his
own bees without fear of harm, has, in a sense, created for himself a
kind of fools’ paradise. All the time his once dear-bought privilege is
slowly forsaking him. He is like the Listerist faddist, who so destroys
all disease germs in his vicinity that his natural disease-resisting
organisation becomes atrophied through want of work. Then, perhaps, his
precautions are upheld for a season, whereupon a particularly virulent
microbe happens by; and, finding the house empty, swept, and garnished,
calls in the seven devils with a will.
Such a contingency is always in wait for the stay-at-home, never-stung
bee-master of neighbourly proclivities. Sooner or later he will be
called to help some maladroit in bee-craft, whose bees have been
thoroughly vitiated by years of “monkeying.” And then the rod will come
out of pickle to a lively tune. Of course, a little stinging is nothing;
but there is no doubt that, with anything over a dozen stings or so at a
time, the most hardened and experienced bee-man may easily stand, for a
minute or two at least, in danger of losing his life.
So it happened to me once. I had gone to look at a neighbour’s stocks.
The bees were as quiet as lambs until I came to the seventh hive; and
then, with hardly a note of warning, they set upon me like a pack of
flying bull-dogs. It is long enough ago now, but I can still give a
pretty accurate account of the symptoms of acute formic-acid poisoning.
It began with a curious pricking and burning over the entire inner
surface of the mouth and throat. This rapidly spread, until my whole
body seemed on fire, and the target, as it were, for millions of red-hot
darts. Then first my tongue and lips, and every other part of head and
neck, in quick succession, began to swell. My eyes felt as though they
were being driven out of my head. My breathing machinery seized up, and
all but stopped. A giddy congestion of brain followed. Finally, sight
and hearing failed, and then almost consciousness.
I can just remember crawling away, and thrusting head and shoulders deep
into a thick lilac bush, where the bees ceased to molest me. But it was
a good hour or more before I could hold the smoker straight again, and
get on with the next stock.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE LONG NIGHT IN THE HIVE
THERE are few things more mystifying to the student of bee-life than the
way in which winter is passed in the hive. Probably nineteen out of
every twenty people, who take a merely theoretical interest in the
subject, entertain no doubt on the matter. Bees hibernate, they will
tell you—pass the winter in a state of torpor, just as many other
insects, reptiles, and animals have been proved to do. And, though the
truth forces itself upon scientific investigators that there is no such
thing as hibernation, in the accepted sense of the word, among hive-bees,
the perplexing part of the whole question is that, as far as modern
observers understand it, the honey-bee ought to hibernate, even if, as a
matter of fact, she does not.
For consider what a world of trouble would be saved if, at the coming of
winter, the worker-bees merely got together in a compact cluster in their
warm nook, with the queen in their midst; and thenceforward slept the
long cold months away, until the hot March sun struck into them with the
tidings that the willows—first caterers for the year’s winged
myriads—were in golden flower once more; and there was nothing to do but
rouse, and take their fill. It would revolutionise the whole aspect of
bee-life, and, to all appearances, vastly for the better. There would be
no more need to labour through the summer days, laying up winter stores.
Life could become for the honey-bee what it is to most other
insects—merry and leisurely. There would be time for dancing in the
sunbeams, and long siestas under rose-leaves; and it would be enough if
each little worker took home an occasional full honey-sac or two for the
babies, instead of wearing out nerve and body in all that desperate
toiling to and fro.
Yet, for some inscrutable reason, the honey-bee elects to keep
awake—uselessly awake, it seems—throughout the four months or so during
which outdoor work is impossible; and to this apparently undesirable,
unprofitable end, she sacrifices all that makes such a life as hers worth
the living from a human point of view.
_Restlessness_, _and the Reason for It_
You can, however, seldom look at wild Nature’s ways from the human
standpoint without danger of postulating too much, or, worse still,
leaving some vital, though invisible thing out of the argument. And this
latter, on a little farther consideration, proves to be what we are now
doing. Prolonged study of hive-life in winter will reveal one hitherto
unsuspected fact. At this time, far from settling down into a life of
sleepy inactivity, the queen-bee seems to develop a restlessness and
impatience not to be observed in her at any other season. It is clear
that the workers would lie quiet enough, if they had only themselves to
consider. They collect in a dense mass between the central combs of the
hive, the outer members of the company just keeping in touch with the
nearest honey-cells. These cells are broached by the furthermost bees,
and the food is distributed from tongue to tongue. As the nearest
store-cells are emptied, the whole concourse moves on, the compacted
crowd of bees thus journeying over the comb at a pace which is steady yet
inconceivably slow.
But this policy seems in no way to commend itself to the queen. Whenever
you look into the hive, even on the coldest winter’s day, she is
generally alert and stirring, keeping the worker-bees about her in a
constant state of wakefulness and care. Though she has long since ceased
to lay, she is always prying about the comb, looking apparently for empty
cells wherein to lay eggs, after her summer habit. Night or day, she
seems always in this unresting state of mind, and the work of getting
their queen through the winter season is evidently a continual source of
worry to the members of the colony. Altogether, the most logical
inference to be drawn from any prolonged and careful investigation of
hive-life in winter is that the queen-bee herself is the main obstacle to
any system of hibernation being adopted in the hive. This lying-by for
the cold weather, however desirable and practicable it may be for the
great army of workers, is obviously dead against the natural instincts of
the queen. And since, being awake, she must be incessantly watched and
fed and cared for, it follows that the whole colony must wake with her,
or at least as many as are necessary to keep her nourished and preserved
from harm.
_The Queen a Slave to Tradition_
Those, however, who are familiar with the resourceful nature of the
honey-bee might expect her to effect an ingenious compromise in these as
in all other circumstances; and the facts seem to point to such a
compromise. It is not easy to be sure of anything when watching the
winter cluster in a hive, for the bees lie so close that inspection
becomes at times almost futile. But one thing at least is certain. The
brood-combs between which the cluster forms are not merely covered by
bees. Into every cell in the comb some bee has crept, head first, and
lies there quite motionless. This attitude is also common at other times
of the year, and there is little doubt that the tired worker-bees do
rest, and probably sleep, thus, whenever an empty cell is available. But
now almost the entire range of brood-cells is filled with resting bees,
like sailors asleep in the bunks of a forecastle; and it is not
unreasonable to suppose that each unit in the cluster alternately watches
with the queen, or takes her “watch below” in the comb-cells.
That there should be in this matter of wintering so sharp a divergence
between the instincts of the queen-mother and her children is in no way
surprising, when we recollect how entirely they differ on almost all
other points. How this fundamental difference has come about in the
course of ages of bee-life is too long a story for these pages. It has
been fully dealt with in an earlier volume by the same writer—“The Lore
of the Honey-Bee”—and to this the reader is referred. But the fact is
pretty generally admitted that, while the little worker-bee is a creature
specially evolved to suit a unique environment, the mother-bee remains
practically identical with the mother-bees of untold ages back. She
retains many of the instincts of the race as it existed under tropic
conditions, when there was no alternation of hot and cold seasons; and
hence her complete inability to understand, and consequent rebellion
against the needs of modern times.
_The Future Evolution of the Hive_
Whether the worker-bees will ever teach her to conform to the changed
conditions is an interesting problem. We know how they have “improved”
life in the hive—how a matriarchal system of government has been
established there, the duty of motherhood relegated to one in the thirty
thousand or so, and how the males are suffered to live only so long as
their procreative powers are useful to the community. It is little
likely that the omnipotent worker-bee will stop here. Failing the
eventual production of a queen-bee who can be put to sleep for the
winter, they may devise means of getting rid of her in the same way as
they disburden themselves of the drones. In some future age the
mother-bee may be ruthlessly slaughtered at the end of each season,
another queen being raised when breeding-time again comes round. Then,
no doubt, honey-bees would hibernate, as do so many other creatures of
the wilds; and the necessity for all that frantic labour throughout the
summer days be obviated.
This is by no means so fantastic a notion as it appears. Ingenious as is
the worker-bee, there is one thing that the mere man-scientist of to-day
could teach her. At present, her system of queen-production is to
construct a very large cell, four or five times as large as that in which
the common worker is raised. Into this cell, at an early stage in its
construction, the old queen is induced to deposit an egg; or the workers
themselves may furnish it with an egg previously laid elsewhere; or
again—as sometimes happens—the large cell may be erected over the site of
an ordinary worker-cell already containing a fertile ovum. This egg in
no way differs from that producing the common, undersized, sex-atrophied
worker-bee; but by dint of super-feeding on a specially rich diet, and
unlimited space wherein to develop, the young grub eventually grows into
a queen-bee, with all the queen’s extraordinary attributes. A queen may
be, and often is, raised by the workers from a grub instead of an egg.
The grub is enclosed in, or possibly in some cases transferred to, the
queen-cell; and, providing it is not more than three days old, this grub
will also become a fully developed queen-bee.
_Hibernation_, _and no Honey_
But, thus far in the history of bee-life, it has been impossible for a
hive to re-queen itself unless a newly-laid egg, or very young larva, has
been available for the purpose. Hibernation without a queen is,
therefore, in the present stage of honey-bee wisdom, unattainable,
because there would be neither egg nor grub to work from in the spring,
when another queen-mother was needed, and the stock must inevitably
perish. Here, however, the scientific bee-master could give his colonies
an invaluable hint, though greatly to his own disadvantage. In the
ordinary heat of the brood-chamber an egg takes about three days to
hatch, but it has been ascertained that a sudden fall in temperature will
often delay this process. The germ of life in all eggs is notoriously
hardy; and it is conceivable that by a system of cold storage, as
carefully studied and ingeniously regulated as are most other affairs of
the hive, the bees might succeed in preserving eggs throughout the winter
in a state of suspended, but not irresuscitable life. And if ever the
honey-bee, in some future age, discovers this possibility, she will
infallibly become a true hibernating insect, and join the ranks of the
summer loiterers and merry-makers. But the bee-master will get no more
honey.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN
“BOOKS,” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, looking round through grey
wreaths of tobacco-smoke at his crowded shelves, “books seem to tell ye
most things ne’ersome-matter; but when it comes to books on bees—well,
’tis somehow quite another pair o’ shoes.”
He stopped to listen to the wind, blowing great guns outside in the
winter darkness. The little cottage seemed to crouch and shudder beneath
the blast, and the rain drove against the lattice-windows with a sobbing,
timorous note. The bee-master drew the old oak settle nearer to the
fire, and sat for a moment silently watching the comfortable blaze.
“‘True as print,’” he went on, lapsing more and more into the quaint,
tangy Sussex dialect, as his theme impressed him; “’twas an old saying o’
my father’s; and right enough, maybe, in his time. A’ couldn’t read, to
be sure; so a’ might have been ower unsceptical. But books was too
expensive in those days to put many lies into.”
He took down at random from the case on the chimney-breast about a dozen
modern, paper-covered treatises on bee-keeping, and threw them, rather
contemptuously, on the table.
“I’m not saying, mind ye,” he hastened to add, “that there’s a word
against truth in any one of them. They’re all true enough, no doubt, for
they contradict each other at every turn. ’Tis as if one man said roses
was white; and another said, ‘No, you’re wrong, they’re yaller’; and a
third said, ‘Y’are both wrong, they’re red.’ And when folks are in
dispute in this way, because they agree, and not because they differ,
there’s little hope of ever pacifying them.
“I heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years ago, that had a good word
about bees. Said she, ‘They never do anything invariably’; and she
warn’t far off the truth. She knew her own sex, did wise Mrs Tupper.
Now, the trouble with the book-writers on bees is that they try to make a
science of something that can never rightly be a science at all. They
try to add two numbers together that they don’t know, an’ that are allers
changing, and are surprised if they don’t arrive at an exact total.
There’s the bees, and there’s the weather: together the result will be so
many pounds of honey. If the English climate went by the calendar, and
the bees worked according to unchangeable rules, you might reckon out
your honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping would be little more
than sitting in a summer-house and figuring on a slate. But with frosts
in June, and August weather in February, and your honey-makers naught but
a tribe of whimsy, sex-thwarted wimmin-folk, a nation of everlasting
spinsters—how can bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of
walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist an’ turn o’ the way
shows something cur’ous or different?”
He stopped to recharge his pipe from the earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like
an old straw beehive, which had yielded solace to many a past generation
of the Warrilow clan.
“’Tis just this matter of sex,” he continued, “that these book-writing
bee-masters seem to leave altogether out of their reckoning. And yet it
lies well to the heart of the whole business. In an average prosperous
hive there are about thirty thousand of these little stunted,
quick-witted worker-bees, not one of which but could have grown into a
fully-developed mother-bee, twice the size, and laying her thousands of
eggs a day, if only her early bringings-up had been different. But
nature has doomed her to be an old maid from her very cradle, although
she is born with all the instincts and capabilities for motherhood that
you wonder at in a fully grown, prolific queen. And yet the bee-masters
expect her to accept her fate without a murmur; to live and work to-day
just as she did yesterday and the day before; to tend and feed patiently
the young bees that she has been denied all part in producing; to support
a lot of lazy drones in luxury and idleness; and generally to act like a
reasonable, contented, happy creature all the way through.”
He took three or four long, contemplative pulls at his Broseley clay,
then came back to his subject and his dialect together.
“’Tis no wonder,” said he “that the little worker-bee gets crotchety time
an’ again. Wimmin-creeturs is all of much the same kidney, whether ’tis
bees or humans. Their natur’ is not to look ahead, but just to do the
next thing. They sees sideways mostly, like a horse with an eye-shade
but no blinkers. But now and then they ups and looks straight afore ’em,
and then ’tis trouble brewing fer masters o’ all kinds, whether in hives
or homes o’ men. Lot’s wife, she were a kind o’ bee-woman; and so were
Eve. I’d ha’ been glad to ha’ knowed ’em both, bless ’em! The world ’ud
be all the sweeter fer a few more like they. Harm done through being too
much of a woman-creetur is never all harm in the long run, depend on’t.”
With his great sunburnt hand he stirred the flimsy, dog-eared pamphlets
about thoughtfully, as a man will stir leaves with a stick.
[Picture: “A Natural Honey-Bees’ Nest”]
“Now, ’tis just this way with bees,” he went on. “If you study how to
keep ’em busy, with plain, right-down necessity hard at their heels, all
goes well. The bees have no time for anything but work. As the supers
fill with honey you take them off and put empty ones in their place. The
queen below fills comb after comb with eggs, and you make the brood-nest
larger and larger. There is allers more room everywhere, dropped down
from the skies, like; no matter how fast the stock increases, nor how
much the bees bring in. Just their plain day’s work is enough, and
more’n enough, for the best of them. And so the summer heat goes by; the
honey harvest is ended; and the bees have had no chance to dwell upon,
and grow rebellious over, the wise wrong that nature has done their sex.
In bee-life ’tis always evil that’s wrought, not by want o’ thought, but
by too much of it. Bad beemanship is just giving bees time to think.”
“Many’s the time,” continued the bee-master, thrusting the bowl of his
empty pipe into the heart of the wood-embers for lustration, and taking a
clean one down for immediate use from the rack over his head; “many’s the
time an’ oft it has come ower me that perhaps bees warn’t allers as we
see them now. Maybe, way back in the times when England was a tropic
country, tens of thousands o’ years ago, there was no call for them to
live packed together in one dark chamber, as they do to-day. If the year
was warm all the twelve months through, and flowers allers blooming,
there ’ud be no need fer a winter-larder, nor fer any hives at all. Like
as not each woman-bee lived by herself then, in some dry nook or other;
made her little nest of comb, and brought up her own children, happy and
comfortable. Maybe, even—and I can well believe it of her, knowing her
natur’ as I do—she kept a gurt, buzzing, blusterous drone about the place
an’ let him eat and drink in idleness while she did all the work, willing
enough, for the two. Then, as the world slowly cooled down through the
centuries, there came a short time in each year when the flowers ceased
to bloom, and the bees found they had to put by a store of honey, to last
till the heat and the blossoms showed up again. And there was another
thing they must have found out when the cold spell was over the earth.
Bees that kept apart by themselves died of cold, but those that huddled
together in crowds lived warm enough throughout the winter. The more
there were of ’em the warmer they kept, and the less food they needed.
And so, as the winters got longer and colder, the bee-colonies increased,
until at last, from force of habit, they took to keeping together all the
year round. So you see, like as not, ’tis experience as has brought ’em
to build their cities of to-day, just as experience, or the One ye never
mention, has put the same thing into the hearts o’ men.”
A sudden flaw of wind struck the little cottage with a sound like
thunder, and made the cut-glass lustres on the mantle tinkle and glitter
in the yellow candle-glow. The old bee-man stopped, with his pipe
half-way to his mouth, nodded gravely towards the window, in a kind of
obeisance to the elements, and then resumed his theme.
“But there’s a many things about bees,” he said, “that no man ’ull come
to the rights of, until all airthly things is made clear in the Day o’
Days. The great trouble and hindrance to bee-keeping is the swarm, and a
good bee-master nowadays tries all he can to circumvent it. But the old
habit comes back again and again, and often with stocks of bees that
haven’t had a fit o’ it for years. Now, did ye ever think what swarming
must have been in the beginning?”
He suddenly levelled the pipe-stem straight at my head.
“Well, ’tis all speckilation, but here’s my idee o’ it, for what ’tis
worth. Take the wapses: they’re thousands of years behind the honey-bee
in development, and so they give ye a look, so to speak, into the past.
The end of a wapse-colony comes when the females are ready in November;
and hundreds of them go off to hide for the winter, each in some hole or
crevice, until, in the warm spring days, each comes out to start a new
and separate home. Well, perhaps the honey-bees did much the same thing
long ago, when they were all mother-bees, in the time when the world was
young. And perhaps the swarm-fever in a hive to-day is naught but a kind
o’ memory of this, still working, though its main use is gone. The books
here will tell ye o’ many other things brought about by swarming, right
an’ good enough with the old-fashioned hives. Yet that gainsays nothing.
Nature allers works double an’ treble handed in all her dealings. Her
every stroke tells far and wide, like the thousand ripples you make when
you pitch a stone in a pond.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW
THERE never comes, in early April, that first bright hot day which means
the beginning of outdoor work on the bee-farm, but I fall to thinking of
old times with a great longing to have them back again.
Modern beemanship, at least to the wide-awake folk in the craft, brings
in gold pieces now where formerly one had much ado to make shillings.
But profit cannot always be reckoned in money. The old mysteries and the
old delusions were a sort of capital that paid cent per cent if you only
humoured them aright. Bee-men, who flourished when there was a young
queen upon the throne, wore their ignorance as the parson his silk and
lawn. It was something that set them apart and above their neighbours.
All that the bees did was put to their credit, just for the trouble of a
wise wag of the head and a little timely reticence. The organ-blower
worked in full view of the congregation, while the player sat invisibly
within, so the blower, after the common trend of earthly affairs, got all
the glory for the tune.
There are no mysteries now in honey-craft. Science has dragooned the
fairies out of sight and hearing as a man treads out sparks in the whin.
But, though the mysteries have gone, the old music of the hives is still
here as sweet as ever. This morning, when the sun was but an hour over
the hilltop, I rose from my bed, and, coming down the creaking stair
through the silence and half-darkness, threw the heavy old house-door
back. At once the level sunshine and the song of bees and birds came
pouring in together. There was the loud humming of bees in the leafing
honeysuckle of the porch, and the soft low note of the hives beyond. In
its plan to-day Warrilow Bee-farm reveals the whole story of its growth
from times long gone to the present. All the hives near the cottage are
old-fashioned skeps of straw, covered in with three sticks and a hackle.
A little way down the slope the ancient bee-boxes begin, eight-sided
Stewartons mostly, with the green veneer of decades upon some of them.
Beyond these stand the first rack-frame hives that ever came to Warrilow;
and thence, stretching away down the sunny hillside in long trim rows,
are the modern frame-bar hives, spick and span in their new Joseph’s
coats of paint, with the gillyflowers driving golden shafts between them,
until they reach the line of sheds—comb and honey-stores,
extracting-house, and workshops—marking the distant lane-side.
_The Water-carriers_
As I stood in the doorway, caught by the mesmeric sheen of the light and
the beauty of the morning, the humming of the bees overhead grew louder
and louder. There were no flowers as yet to attract them, but in early
April the dense canopy of honeysuckle here is always besieged with bees,
directly the sun has warmed the clinging dewdrops. These were the
water-carriers from the hives. Water at this time is one of the main
necessities of bee-life. With it the workers are able to reduce the
thick honey and the dry pollen to the right consistency for consumption,
and can then generate the bee-milk with which the young larvæ are fed.
Later on in the day the water-fetchers will crowd in hundreds to the oozy
pond-side down in the valley—every bee-garden has its ancestral
drinking-place invariably resorted to year after year. But thus early
the pond-water is too cold for safe transport by so chilly a mortal as
the little worker-bee; so Nature warms a temporary supply for her here
where the dew trembles like drops of molten rainbow at the tip of each
woodbine leaf.
I drank myself a deep draught from the well that goes down a sheer sixty
feet into the virgin chalk of the hillside, and fell to loitering through
the garden ways. Though it was so early, the little oil-engine down
below in the hive-making shed was already coughing shrilly through its
vent-pipe, and the saw thrumming. Here and there among the hives my men
stooped at their work. The pony was harnessing to the cart, and would
soon be plodding the three-mile-long road to the station with the day’s
deliveries of honey. By all laws of duty I should be down there, taking
my row of hives with the rest—master and men side by side like a string
of turnip-hoers—busy at the spring examination which, as all bee-men
know, is the most important work of the year. But the very thought of
opening hives, now in the first warm break of April weather or at any
time, filled me with a strange loathing. So it never used to be, never
could be, in the old days whose memory always comes flooding back to me
at this season with such a clear call and such a hindrance to progress
and duty. Then I had as little dreamed of opening a hive as opening a
vein. I should have done no more than I was doing now—passing from one
old straw skep to another through the sweet vernal sunshine, my boots
scattering the dew from the grass as I went, and looking for signs that
tell the bee-man nearly all he really needs to know. I shut my ears to
the throaty song of the engine. I heard the cart drive away without a
thought of scanning its load. I got me down in a little nook of red
currant flowers under the wall, where the old straw hives were thickest,
and gave myself up to idle dreams, dreams of the bees and bee-men of long
ago.
I should be splitting elder, thought I; splitting the long, straight
wands to make feeding-troughs. I called to mind doing it, here on this
self-same bench near upon fifty years ago, with my father, the woodman,
sitting at my elbow learning me. We split the wands clean and true,
scooped out the pith from each half, and dammed up its ends with clay.
Then, with a handful of these crescent troughs and a can of syrup, we
went the round of the garden together looking for stocks that were short
of stores. When we found one, we pushed the hollow slip of elder gently
into the hive-entrance as far as it would go, and filled it with syrup,
filling it again and again throughout the day as the bees within drank it
dry.
_The Old Style and the New_
A queer figure my father cut in his short grey smock and his long lean
bent legs encased in leathern gaiters, legs between which, when I was
little, and trotting after him, I had always a fine view of the sky. He
was never at fault in his estimate of a hive’s prosperity. The rich
clear song and steady traffic of a well-to-do bee-nation he knew at once
from the anxious note and frantic coming and going of a
starvation-threatened hive. It was the tune that told him. Nowadays we
just rip the coverings from a hive and, lifting the combs out one by one,
judge by sheer brute-force of eyesight whether there be need or plenty.
“One-thirty-two!”—from my sunny seat under the pink currant blossom I can
hear the call of the foreman to the booking ’prentice down in the
bee-farm—“One-thirty-two—six frames covered—no moth—medium light—brood
over three—mark R.Q.” R.Q. means that the stock is to be re-queened at
the earliest opportunity. She has been a famous queen in her
time—One-thirty-two. This would have been her fourth year, had she kept
up her fertility. But “brood over three”—that is to say, only three
combs with young bees maturing in them—is not good enough for
progressive, up-to-date Warrilow in April, and she must be pinched at
last. In the common course, I never let a queen remain at the head of
affairs after her second season. Nine out of ten of them break down
under the wear and stress of two summers, and fall to useless
drone-breeding in the third.
Already the sun has climbed high, and yet I linger, though I know I
should be gone an hour ago. The darkness, far away as it seems, will not
find all done that should be done on the bee-farm, toil as hard as we
may. For these sudden hot days in spring often come singly, and every
moment of them is precious. To-morrow the north wind may be keening
under an iron-grey sky, and pallid wreaths of snow-flakes weighing down
the almond-blossom. So it happened only a year ago, when on the
twenty-fifth of April I must clear away the snow from the entrance-boards
of the hives. It is, I think, the unending round of business—the itch
that is on us now of finding a day’s work for every day in the year in
modern beecraft—which has had most to do with the changed times. The old
leisure, as well as the old colour and mystery, has gone out of
bee-keeping. Between burning-time in August and swarming-time in May
there used to be little else for the bee-master to do but smoke his pipe
and ruminate and watch the wax flowing into the hives. For we all
believed that the little pellets of many-tinted pollen which the bees
constantly carry in on their thighs were not food for the grubs in the
cells, but wax for the comb-building. I could believe it now, indeed, if
I might only sit here long enough; but the busy voices are calling,
calling, and I must be gone.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY
AMONG the innumerable scraps of more or less erroneous information on
hive-life, dished up by the popular newspapers in course of the year’s
round, there is occasionally one which is sure to grip the curious
reader’s attention. No one expects nowadays to read of the honey-bee
without being set agape at the marvellous; but, really, when he is
gravely told that the nurse-bees in a hive actually give the breast to
their young, suckling them with a secreted liquid which is nothing more
or less than milk, the ordinarily faithful newspaper student is entitled
to be for once incredulous.
The thing, however, in spite of its grotesque improbability, comes nearer
to the plain truth than many another item of bee-life more often
encountered and unquestionably accepted. There are veritable nurse-bees
in a hive, and these do produce something not unlike milk. In about
three days after the egg has been deposited in the comb-cell by the
queen, or mother-bee, a tiny white grub emerges. The feeding of this
grub is immediately commenced by the bees in charge of the nursery
quarters of the hive, and there is administered to it a glistening white
substance closely resembling thick cream.
Analysts tell us that this bee-milk, as it is called, is highly
nitrogenous in character, and that it has a decidedly acid reaction. It
is obviously produced from the mouths of the nurse-bees, and appears to
be digested matter thrown up from some part of the bee’s internal system,
and combined with the secretions from one or more of the four separate
sets of glands which open into different parts of the worker-bee’s mouth.
The power to secrete this bee-milk seems to be normally limited to those
workers who are under fourteen or fifteen days old. After that time the
bee runs dry, her nursing work is relinquished, and she goes out to
forage for nectar and pollen, never, as far as is known, resuming the
task of feeding the young grubs. But if the faculty is not exercised, it
may be held in abeyance for months together. This takes place at the
close of each year, when we know that the last bees born to the hive in
autumn are those who supply the milk for the first batches of larva
raised in the ensuing spring.
It is difficult to keep out the wonder-weaving mood when writing of any
phase of hive-life, and especially so when we have this bee-milk under
consideration. For all recent studies of the matter tend to prove
several facts about it not merely wonderful, but verging on the
mysterious.
In the first place, its composition seems to be variable at the will of
the bees. The white liquid is supplied to the grubs of worker, queen,
and drone, and not only is its nature different with each, but it is even
possible that this may be farther modified in the various stages of their
development. It is well ascertained that the physical and temperamental
differences between queen and worker-bee, widely marked as they appear,
are entirely due to treatment and feeding during the larval stage. That
the eggs producing the two are identical is proved by the fact that these
can be transposed without confounding the original purpose of the hive.
The queen-egg placed in the worker-cell develops into a common worker,
while the worker-egg, when exalted to a queen’s cradle, infallibly
produces a fully accoutred queen bee. The experiment can also be made
even with the young grubs, provided that these are no more than three
days old, and the same result ensues.
A close study of the food administered to bees when in the larval stage
of their career is specially interesting, because it gives us the key to
many otherwise inexplicable matters connected with hive-life. We do not
know, and probably never shall know, how mere variation in diet causes
certain organs to appear and certain other bodily parts to absent
themselves. If the difference between queen and worker-bee were simply
one of development, the worker being only an undersized, semi-atrophied
specimen of a queen, there would be little mystery about it. But each
has several highly specialised organs, of which the other has no trace,
just as each has certain functions reduced to mere rudimentary
uselessness, which, in the other, possess enormous development and a
corresponding importance.
Clearly the food given in each case has peculiar properties, bringing
about certain definite invariable results. We are able, therefore, to
say positively that most of the classic marvels of bee-life are built up
on this one determined issue, this one logical adjustment of cause and
effect. The hive creates thousands of sexless workers and only one
fertile mother-bee. It limits the number of its offspring according to
the visible food supplies or the needs of the commonwealth. It brings
into existence, when necessity calls for them, hundreds of male bees or
drones, and when their period of usefulness is over it decrees their
extermination. When the queen’s fecundity declines, it raises another
queen to take her place. It can even, under certain rare conditions of
adversity, manufacture what is known as a fertile worker, when some
mischance has deprived it of its mother-bee and the materials for
providing a legitimate successor to her are not forthcoming. And all
these results are primarily brought about by the one means, the one
vehicle of mystery—this wonderful bee-milk playing its part at all stages
in the honey-bee’s life from her cradle to her grave.
For to track down this subtly-compounded elixir through all its various
uses one must take a survey of almost the whole round of activities in
the hive. The food of the young larva, whether of queen or worker, for
the first three days after the eggs are hatched, seems to consist
entirely of bee-milk. The drone-grub gets an extra day of this richly
nitrogenous diet. And for the remaining two days of the grub stage of
the bee’s life milk is given continuously, but, in the case of the worker
and drone, in greatly diminished supply. Its place during these two days
is largely taken, it is said, by honey and digested pollen in the
worker’s instance, and by honey and raw pollen for the males.
The queen-grub alone receives bee-milk, of a specially rich kind and in
unlimited quantity, for the whole of her larval life. This “royal
jelly,” as the old bee-masters termed it, is literally poured into the
capacious queen-cell. For the whole five days of her existence as a
larva she actually bathes in it up to the eyes. But, as far as is known,
she receives no other food during this time. The regular order of her
development, and of that of the worker-bee, during the five days of the
grub stage has been carefully studied, and it is curious to note that the
very time when the queen’s special organs of motherhood begin to show
themselves coincides exactly with the moment at which the worker-grub’s
allowance of bee-milk is cut down and other food substituted.
This, no doubt, explains why these organs in the adult worker-bee are so
elementary as to be practically non-existent, and accounts for the
queen’s generous growth in other directions. But it leaves us completely
in the dark as to the reason for the worker’s subsequent elaboration of
such organs as the pollen-carrying device, the so-called wax-pincers, and
the wax-secreting glands, of which the queen possesses none. Nor are we
able to see how the giving or withholding of the bee-milk should furnish
the queen with a long curved sting and the worker with a short straight
one; nor how mere manipulation of diet can result in making the two so
dissimilar in temperament and mental attributes—the worker laborious,
sociable, almost preternaturally alert of mind, and withal essentially a
creature of the open air and sunshine; the queen dull of intelligence,
possessed of a jealous hatred of her peers, for whom all the light and
colour and fragrance of a summer’s morning have no allurements, a being
whose every instinct keeps her, from year’s end to year’s end, pent in
the crowded tropic gloom of the hive.
But the bee-milk as well as being the main ingredient in the larval food,
has other and almost equally important uses. It is supplied by the
workers to the adult queen and drones throughout nearly the whole of
their lives, and forms an indispensable part of their daily diet. And
this gives us a clue in our attempt to understand, not only how the
population of the hive is regulated, but why the males are so easily
disposed of when the annual drone-massacre sets in. By giving or
depriving her of the bee-milk, the workers can either stimulate the queen
to an enormous daily output of eggs or reduce her fertility to a bare
minimum; and, as for the drones, it is starvation that is the secret of
their half-hearted, feeble resistance to fate.
Yet though we may recount these things, and speak of this mysterious
essence called bee-milk as really the mainspring of all effort and
achievement within the hive, it is doubtful whether we have solved the
greatest mystery of all about it. Of what is it composed, and whence is
it derived? The generally-accepted explanation of its origin is that it
is pollen-chyle regurgitated from the second stomach of the bee, combined
with the secretions from certain glands of the mouth in passing. But the
most careful dissections have never revealed anything like bee-milk in
any part of the bee’s internal system. Its pure white, opaque quality
has absolutely no counterpart there: nor, indeed—if we are to believe
latest investigations—does pollen-chyle exist at all in either the first
or second stomach of the bee, whence alone it could be regurgitated.
Bee-milk, it would seem, is still a physiological mystery, and so may
remain to the end of time.
CHAPTER XXX
THE BEE-BURNERS
COUNTRY wanderings towards the end of summer, even now when the twentieth
century is two decades old, still bring to light many ancient and curious
things. Within an hour of London, and side by side with the latest
agricultural improvements, you can still see corn coming down to the old
reaping-hook, still watch the plough-team of bullocks toiling over the
hillside, still get that unholy whiff of sulphur in the bee-gardens where
the old-fashioned skeppists are “taking up” their bees.
Burning-time came round usually towards the end of August, sooner or
later according to the turn of the season. The bee-keeper went the round
of his hives, choosing out the heaviest and the lightest stocks. The
heaviest hives were taken because they contained most honey; the lightest
because, being short of stores, they were unlikely to survive the winter,
and had best be put to profit at once for what they were worth. Thus a
complete reversal of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest was
artificially brought about by the old bee-masters. The most vigorous
strains of bees were carefully weeded out year by year, and the
perpetuation of the race left to those stocks which had proved themselves
malingerers and half-hearts.
There was also another way in which this system worked wholly for the
bad. If a hive of bees reached burning-time with a fully charged
storehouse, it was probably due to the fact that the stock had cast no
swarm that year, and had, therefore, preserved its whole force of workers
for honey-getting. Under the light of modern knowledge, any stall of
bees that showed a lessened tendency towards swarming would be carefully
set aside, and used as the mother-hive for future generations; for this
habit of swarming, necessary under the old dispensation, is nothing else
than a fatal drawback under the new. The scientific bee-master of
to-day, with his expanding brood-chambers and his system of supplying his
hives artificially with young and prolific queens every third year, has
no manner of use for the old swarming-habit. It serves but to break up
and hopelessly to weaken his stocks just when he has got them to prime
working fettle. Although the honey-bee still clings to this ancient
impulse, there is no doubt that selective cultivation will ultimately
evolve a race of bees in which the swarming-fever shall have been much
abated, if not wholly extinguished; and then the problem of cheap English
honey will have been solved. But in ancient times the bee-gardens were
replenished only from those hives wherein the swarming-fever was most
rampant. The old bee-keepers, in consigning all their heavy stocks to
the sulphur-pit, unconsciously did their best to exterminate all
non-swarming strains.
The bee-burning took place about sunset, or as soon as the last
honey-seekers were home for the night. Small circular pits were dug in
some quiet corner hard by. These were about six or eight inches deep,
and a handful of old rags that had been dipped in melted brimstone having
been put in, the bee-keeper went to fetch the first hive. The whole fell
business went through in a strange solemnity and quietude. A knife was
gently run round under the edge of the skep, to free it from its stool,
and the hive carefully lifted and carried, mouth downwards, towards the
sulphur-pit, none of the doomed bees being any the wiser. Then the rag
was ignited and the skep lowered over the pit. An angry buzzing broke
out as the fumes reached the undermost bees in the cluster, but this
quickly died down into silence. In a minute or two every bee had
perished, and the pit was ready for the next hive.
That this senseless and wickedly wasteful custom should have been almost
universal among bee-men up to comparatively recent times is sufficiently
a matter for wonder; but that the practice should still survive in
certain country districts to-day well-nigh passes belief. If the art of
bee-driving—a simple and easy method by which all the bees in a full hive
may be transferred unhurt to an empty one, and that within a few
minutes—were a new discovery, the thing might be condoned as all of a
piece with the general benightedness of mediæval folk. But bee-driving
was known, and openly advocated, by several writers on apiculture at
least a hundred years ago. By this method, just as easy as the old and
cruel one, not only do the entire stores of each hive fall into the
undisputed possession of the bee-master, but he retains the colony of
bees complete and unharmed for future service. He has secured all the
golden eggs, and the goose is still alive.
Those who desire to make a start in beemanship inexpensively might do
worse than adopt a practice which the writer has followed for many years
past. As soon as the time for the bee-burners’ work arrives, a bicycle
is rigged up with a bamboo elongation fore and aft. From this depend a
number of straw skeps tied over with cheese-cloth. A bee-smoker and a
set of driving-irons complete the equipment, and there is no more to do
than sally forth into the country in search of condemned bees.
It is usually not difficult to persuade the cottage apiarist to let you
operate on his hives. As soon as he learns that all you ask for your
trouble is the bees, while you undertake to leave him the entire
honey-crop and a _pour-boire_ into the bargain, he readily gives you
access to his stalls. The work before you is now surprisingly simple. A
few strong puffs of smoke into the entrance of the hive under
manipulation will effectually subdue the bees. Then the hive is lifted,
turned over, and placed mouth upwards in any convenient receptacle—a pail
or bucket will do, and will hold it as firmly as need be. Your own
travelling-gear now comes into use. One of the empty skeps is fitted
over the inverted hive. The two are pinned together with an ordinary
meat-skewer at one point, and then the skep is prised up and fixed on
each side with the driving-irons, so that the whole looks like a box with
the lid half-raised. Now you have merely to take up a position in front
of the two hives, and begin a steady gentle thumping on the lower one
with the palms of the hands.
At first, as the combs begin to vibrate, nothing but chaos and
bewilderment are observable among the bees. For a moment or two they run
hither and thither in obvious confusion. But presently they seem to get
an inkling of what is required of them, and then follows one of the most
interesting, not to say fascinating, sights in the whole domain of
bee-craft. Evidently the bees arrive at a common agreement that the
foundations of their old home have become, from some mysterious cause or
other, undermined and perilous; and the word goes forth that the
stronghold must be abandoned without more ado. On what initiation the
manœuvre is started has never been properly ascertained; but in a little
while an ordered discipline seems to spread throughout the erstwhile
distracted multitude. In one solid hurrying phalanx the bees begin to
sweep up into the empty skep. Once fairly on the march, the process is
soon completed. In eight or ten minutes at most, the entire colony hangs
in a dense compact cluster from the roof of your hive. Below,
brood-combs and honey-combs are alike entirely deserted. There is
nothing left for you to do now but carefully to detach the uppermost
skep: replace the cheese-cloth, thus securing your prisoners for their
journey to their new home; and to set about driving the next stock.
CHAPTER XXXI
EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE
THE bee-master, explaining to an interested novice the wonders of the
modern bar-frame hive, often finds himself confronted by a very awkward
question. He is at no loss for words, so long as he confines himself to
an enumeration of the hive’s many advantages over the ancient straw
skep—its elastic brood and honey chambers, its movable combs
interchangeable with all other hives in the garden, its power of doubling
and trebling both the number of worker-bees in a colony and the amount of
harvested honey; above all, its control over sanitation and the breeding
of unnecessary drones. But when he is asked the question: Who invented
this hive which has brought about such a revolution in bee-craft? his
eloquence generally comes to a dead stop. Perhaps one in a hundred of
skilled modern bee-keepers is able to answer the query. But the
ninety-nine will tell you the bar-frame hive had no single inventor; it
came to its latter-day perfection by little and little—the conglomerate
result of years of experience and the working of many minds.
[Picture: “Ancient cottage ruin showing recesses for hives”]
This is, of course, as true of the modern bee-hive as it is of all other
appliances of world-wide utility. But it is equally true that everything
must have had a prime inception at some time, and through some special
human agency or other; and, in the case of the bar-frame hive, the
honours appear to be pretty equally divided between two personages widely
separated in the world’s history—Samson and Sir Christopher Wren.
Perhaps these two names have never before been bracketed together either
in or out of print; yet that the association is not a fanciful, but in
all respects a natural and necessary one will not be difficult to prove.
The story of how Samson, albeit unconsciously, first gave the idea of the
movable comb-frame to an English bee-master is probably new to most
apiarians. As to whether the cloud of insects which Samson saw about the
carcase of the dead lion were honey-bees or merely drone-flies, we need
not here pause to determine. We are concerned for the moment only with
one modern explanation of the incident. This is that, although
honey-bees abominate carrion in general, in this particular case the
carcase had been so dried and emptied and purified by the sun and usual
scavenging agencies of the desert as to leave nothing but a shell—a very
serviceable makeshift for a bee-hive, in fact—consisting of the tanned
skin stretched over the ribs of the lion.
In the summer of 1834 a certain Major Munn was walking among his hives,
pondering the ancient Bible narrative, when a sudden brilliant idea
occurred to him. Like most advanced bee-keepers of his day, he had long
grown dissatisfied with the straw hive, and his bees were housed in
square wooden boxes. But these, although more lasting, were nearly as
unmanageable as the skeps. The bees built their combs within them on
just the same haphazard plan; and, once built, the combs were fixed
permanently to the tops of the boxes. Now, the idea which had occurred
to Major Munn was simply this: He reflected that the combs built by the
bees in the dry shell of the lion-skin were probably attached each to one
of the encircling ribs; so that, when Samson took the honey-comb, all he
need have done was to remove a rib, bringing the attached comb away with
it. Thereupon Major Munn set to work to make a hive on the rib-plan,
which was composed of a number of wooden frames standing side by side,
each to contain a comb and each removable at will. Since that time
numberless small and great improvements have been devised; but, in its
essence, the modern hive is no more than the dried lion-skin distended by
the ribs, as Samson found it on that day when he went on his fateful
mission of wooing.
The part played by Sir Christopher Wren in the evolution of the bar-frame
hive, though not so romantic, was fraught with almost equal significance
to modern bee-craft. Movable comb-frames were as yet undreamed of in
Wren’s time, nearly two hundred years before Major Munn invented them.
But Wren seems to have been the discoverer of a principle just as
important. This was what latter-day bee-keepers call “storification.”
Wren’s hive consisted of a series of wooden boxes, octagonal in shape,
placed one below the other, with inter-communicating doors, and glass
windows in the sides of each section. Up to that date bee-hives had been
merely single receptacles made of straw, plastered wattles, or wood.
When the stock had outgrown its dwelling there was nothing for it but to
swarm. But by the device of adding another story below the first one,
when this was crowded with bees, and a third or even a fourth if
necessary, Wren was able to make his hive grow with the growth of his
bee-colony or contract with its post-seasonal decline. He had, in fact,
invented the elastic brood-chamber, which alone enables the bee-master to
put in practice the one cardinal maxim of successful bee-keeping—the
production of strong stocks.
Wren’s octagon storifying hive seems to have been plagiarised by most
eminent bee-masters of his day and after with the naïve dishonesty so
characteristic among bee-men of the time. Thorley’s hive is obviously
taken from, indeed, is probably identical with, that of Wren. The hive
made and sold by Moses Rusden, King Charles II.’s bee-master, is of
almost exactly the same pattern, but it is described as manufactured
under the patent of one John Geddie. This patent was taken out by Geddie
in 1675, and Geddie would appear to be the arch-purloiner of the whole
crew. For it is quite certain that, having had one of Wren’s hives shown
to him, he was not content with merely copying it, but actually went and
patented the principle as his own idea.
But Wren’s hive, good as it was in comparison with the single-chambered
straw skep or wooden box, still lacked one vital element. Although he
and his imitators had realised the advantage of an expanding bee-hive,
this was secured only by the process of “nadiring,” or adding room below.
Thus the upper part of Wren’s hive always contained the oldest and
dirtiest combs, and as bees almost invariably carry their stores upwards,
the production of clear, uncontaminated honey under this system was
impossible. It remained for a Scotsman, Robert Kerr, of Stewarton, in
Ayrshire, to perfect, some hundred and fifty years later, what Wren had
so ingeniously begun.
Whether Kerr—or “Bee Robin,” as he was called by his neighbours—ever saw
or heard of hives on Sir Christopher Wren’s plan has never been
ascertained. But plagiarism was in the air throughout those far-off
times, and there is no reason to think Kerr better than his fellows. In
any case, the “Stewarton” hive, like Wren’s, was octagon in shape, and
had several stories; but these stories were added above as well as below.
By placing his empty boxes first underneath the original brood-chamber,
to stimulate increase of population, and then, when the honey-flow began,
placing more boxes above to receive the surplus honey, “Bee Robin”
succeeded in getting some wonderful harvests. His big supers, full of
snow-white virgin honey-comb, were soon the talk of Glasgow, where he
readily sold them. Imitators sprang up far and near, and it is only
within the last twenty-five or thirty years that his hives can be said to
have fallen into desuetude.
But probably his success was due not more to his invention of the
expanding honey-chamber than to two other important innovations which he
effected in bee-craft. The octagonal boxes of Wren had fixed tops with a
central hole, much like the straw hive still used by the old-fashioned
bee-keepers to this day. “Bee Robin” did away with these fixed tops, and
substituted a number of parallel wooden bars from which the combs were
suspended, the spaces between the bars being filled by slides
withdrawable at will. He could thus, after having added a story to his
honey-chamber, allow the bees access to it by withdrawing his slides from
the outside: and when the super was filled with honey-comb, the slides
were again employed in shutting off communication, whereupon the super
could be easily removed.
This, however, though it greatly facilitated the work of the bee-master,
did not account for the large yields of surplus honey, which the
“Stewarton” hive first made possible. In the light of modern
bee-knowledge, it is plain that a big honey-harvest can only be secured
by a corresponding large stock of bees, and Robert Kerr seems to have
been the originator of what was nothing less than a revolution in the
craft. Hitherto the bee-keeper had estimated his wealth according to the
number of his hives, and the more these subdivided by swarming, the more
prosperous their owner accounted himself. But “Bee Robin” reversed all
this. He housed his swarms not singly, but always two at a time; and he
made large stocks out of small ones by the simple expedient of piling the
brood-boxes of several colonies together. In a word, it was the
“Dreadnought” principle applied to the peaceful traffic of the hives.
* * * * *
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* * * * *
THE LORE
OF THE HONEY-BEE
BY
TICKNER EDWARDES
* * * * *
_OPINIONS OF THE PRESS_
“An eminently readable book . . . admirably illustrated, not unworthy
to rank beside the masterpiece of Maurice Maeterlinck.”—_Times_.
“It must, of course, sound like grossly exaggerated praise if one
says that a book has appeared in the hustled crowd of
twentieth-century volumes which is a worthy successor to Gilbert
White’s ‘Natural History of Selborne,’ but the interest, charm, and
‘personality’ of Mr Edwardes’ work tempt one to class him among the
rare masters of that most difficult art which preserves the perfume
of country joys in printers’ ink.”—_World_.
“A wholly charming book that should become a classic. Nothing quite
so good, or written with such complete literary skill, has appeared
from an English printing-press for long enough. . . . It deserves a
place upon the select bookshelf that holds ‘The Compleat Angler’ and
George Herbert’s ‘Temple’”—_County Gentleman_.
“A work of quite extraordinary interest.”—_Spectator_.
“A wonderful story . . . told with great charm, and much delicate
literary art.”—_Daily Telegraph_.
“A fascinating tale. . . . Quite into the front rank of writers
steps Mr Edwardes, who, in ‘The Lore of the Honey-Bee’ gives us a
book which, while full of information, is worth reading for its
literary charm alone.”—_Daily Mail_.
“A volume which shows up the life of the bee in fresh and brilliant
facets—a book which every bee-lover will cherish.”—_Glasgow News_.
“All the virtues of Maeterlinck’s well-known prose epic, without its
failings . . . Every page is intensely interesting. . . . The book
is embellished with twenty-four of the clearest and best photographs
of bee economy that we have seen.”—_Daily News_.
“A lively and informing book . . . the many illustrations well
chosen, and all good . . . Mr Tickner Edwardes has done nothing so
good as this.”—_Daily Chronicle_.
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FOOTNOTES.
{43} Before the War.
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