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.”
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.
“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 p. 88suddenly 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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.