Whether the worker-bees will ever teach her to conform to the changed conditions is an interesting problem. We know how they have “improved” life in the hive—how a matriarchal system of government has been established there, the duty of motherhood relegated to one in the thirty thousand or so, and how the males are suffered to live only so long as their procreative powers are useful to the community. It is little likely that the omnipotent worker-bee will stop here. Failing the eventual production of a queen-bee who can be put to sleep for the winter, they may devise means of getting rid of her in the same way as they disburden themselves of the drones. In some future age the mother-bee may be ruthlessly slaughtered at the end of each season, another queen being raised when breeding-time again comes round. Then, no doubt, honey-bees would hibernate, as do so manyother creatures of the wilds; and the necessity for all that frantic labour throughout the summer days be obviated.
This is by no means so fantastic a notion as it appears. Ingenious as is the worker-bee, there is one thing that the mere man-scientist of to-day could teach her. At present, her system of queen-production is to construct a very large cell, four or five times as large as that in which the common worker is raised. Into this cell, at an early stage in its construction, the old queen is induced to deposit an egg; or the workers themselves may furnish it with an egg previously laid elsewhere; or again—as sometimes happens—the large cell may be erected over the site of an ordinary worker-cell already containing a fertile ovum. This egg in no way differs from that producing the common, undersized, sex-atrophied worker-bee; but by dint of super-feeding on a specially rich diet, and unlimited space wherein to develop, the young grub eventually grows into a queen-bee, with all the queen’s extraordinary attributes. A queen may be, and often is, raised by the workers from a grub instead of an egg. The grub is enclosed in, or possibly in some cases transferred to, the queen-cell; and, providing it is not more than three days old, this grub will also become a fully developed queen-bee.
But, thus far in the history of bee-life, it has been impossible for a hive to re-queen itself unless a newly-laid egg, or very young larva, has been available for the purpose. Hibernation without aqueen is, therefore, in the present stage of honey-bee wisdom, unattainable, because there would be neither egg nor grub to work from in the spring, when another queen-mother was needed, and the stock must inevitably perish. Here, however, the scientific bee-master could give his colonies an invaluable hint, though greatly to his own disadvantage. In the ordinary heat of the brood-chamber an egg takes about three days to hatch, but it has been ascertained that a sudden fall in temperature will often delay this process. The germ of life in all eggs is notoriously hardy; and it is conceivable that by a system of cold storage, as carefully studied and ingeniously regulated as are most other affairs of the hive, the bees might succeed in preserving eggs throughout the winter in a state of suspended, but not irresuscitable life. And if ever the honey-bee, in some future age, discovers this possibility, she will infallibly become a true hibernating insect, and join the ranks of the summer loiterers and merry-makers. But the bee-master will get no more honey.
“Books,” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, looking round through grey wreaths of tobacco-smoke at his crowded shelves, “books seem to tell ye most things ne’ersome-matter; but when it comes to books on bees—well, ’tis somehow quite another pair o’ shoes.”
He stopped to listen to the wind, blowing great guns outside in the winter darkness. The little cottage seemed to crouch and shudder beneath the blast, and the rain drove against the lattice-windows with a sobbing, timorous note. The bee-master drew the old oak settle nearer to the fire, and sat for a moment silently watching the comfortable blaze.
“‘True as print,’” he went on, lapsing more and more into the quaint, tangy Sussex dialect, as his theme impressed him; “’twas an old saying o’ my father’s; and right enough, maybe, in his time. A’ couldn’t read, to be sure; so a’ might have been ower unsceptical. But books was too expensive in those days to put many lies into.”
He took down at random from the case on thechimney-breast about a dozen modern, paper-covered treatises on bee-keeping, and threw them, rather contemptuously, on the table.
“I’m not saying, mind ye,” he hastened to add, “that there’s a word against truth in any one of them. They’re all true enough, no doubt, for they contradict each other at every turn. ’Tis as if one man said roses was white; and another said, ‘No, you’re wrong, they’re yaller’; and a third said, ‘Y’are both wrong, they’re red.’ And when folks are in dispute in this way, because they agree, and not because they differ, there’s little hope of ever pacifying them.
“I heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years ago, that had a good word about bees. Said she, ‘They never do anything invariably’; and she warn’t far off the truth. She knew her own sex, did wise Mrs Tupper. Now, the trouble with the book-writers on bees is that they try to make a science of something that can never rightly be a science at all. They try to add two numbers together that they don’t know, an’ that are allers changing, and are surprised if they don’t arrive at an exact total. There’s the bees, and there’s the weather: together the result will be so many pounds of honey. If the English climate went by the calendar, and the bees worked according to unchangeable rules, you might reckon out your honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping would be little more than sitting in a summer-house and figuring on a slate. But with frosts in June, and August weather in February, and your honey-makers naught but a tribe of whimsy, sex-thwarted wimmin-folk, a nation of everlasting spinsters—howcan bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist an’ turn o’ the way shows something cur’ous or different?”
He stopped to recharge his pipe from the earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like an old straw beehive, which had yielded solace to many a past generation of the Warrilow clan.
“’Tis just this matter of sex,” he continued, “that these book-writing bee-masters seem to leave altogether out of their reckoning. And yet it lies well to the heart of the whole business. In an average prosperous hive there are about thirty thousand of these little stunted, quick-witted worker-bees, not one of which but could have grown into a fully-developed mother-bee, twice the size, and laying her thousands of eggs a day, if only her early bringings-up had been different. But nature has doomed her to be an old maid from her very cradle, although she is born with all the instincts and capabilities for motherhood that you wonder at in a fully grown, prolific queen. And yet the bee-masters expect her to accept her fate without a murmur; to live and work to-day just as she did yesterday and the day before; to tend and feed patiently the young bees that she has been denied all part in producing; to support a lot of lazy drones in luxury and idleness; and generally to act like a reasonable, contented, happy creature all the way through.”
He took three or four long, contemplative pulls at his Broseley clay, then came back to his subject and his dialect together.
“’Tis no wonder,” said he “that the littleworker-bee gets crotchety time an’ again. Wimmin-creeturs is all of much the same kidney, whether ’tis bees or humans. Their natur’ is not to look ahead, but just to do the next thing. They sees sideways mostly, like a horse with an eye-shade but no blinkers. But now and then they ups and looks straight afore ’em, and then ’tis trouble brewing fer masters o’ all kinds, whether in hives or homes o’ men. Lot’s wife, she were a kind o’ bee-woman; and so were Eve. I’d ha’ been glad to ha’ knowed ’em both, bless ’em! The world ’ud be all the sweeter fer a few more like they. Harm done through being too much of a woman-creetur is never all harm in the long run, depend on’t.”
With his great sunburnt hand he stirred the flimsy, dog-eared pamphlets about thoughtfully, as a man will stir leaves with a stick.
“A Natural Honey-Bees’ Nest”
“Now, ’tis just this way with bees,” he went on. “If you study how to keep ’em busy, with plain, right-down necessity hard at their heels, all goes well. The bees have no time for anything but work. As the supers fill with honey you take them off and put empty ones in their place. The queen below fills comb after comb with eggs, and you make the brood-nest larger and larger. There is allers more room everywhere, dropped down from the skies, like; no matter how fast the stock increases, nor how much the bees bring in. Just their plain day’s work is enough, and more’n enough, for the best of them. And so the summer heat goes by; the honey harvest is ended; and the bees have had no chance to dwell upon, and grow rebellious over, the wise wrong that nature has done their sex. In bee-life ’tis always evil that’swrought, not by want o’ thought, but by too much of it. Bad beemanship is just giving bees time to think.”
“Many’s the time,” continued the bee-master, thrusting the bowl of his empty pipe into the heart of the wood-embers for lustration, and taking a clean one down for immediate use from the rack over his head; “many’s the time an’ oft it has come ower me that perhaps bees warn’t allers as we see them now. Maybe, way back in the times when England was a tropic country, tens of thousands o’ years ago, there was no call for them to live packed together in one dark chamber, as they do to-day. If the year was warm all the twelve months through, and flowers allers blooming, there ’ud be no need fer a winter-larder, nor fer any hives at all. Like as not each woman-bee lived by herself then, in some dry nook or other; made her little nest of comb, and brought up her own children, happy and comfortable. Maybe, even—and I can well believe it of her, knowing her natur’ as I do—she kept a gurt, buzzing, blusterous drone about the place an’ let him eat and drink in idleness while she did all the work, willing enough, for the two. Then, as the world slowly cooled down through the centuries, there came a short time in each year when the flowers ceased to bloom, and the bees found they had to put by a store of honey, to last till the heat and the blossoms showed up again. And there was another thing they must have found out when the cold spell was over the earth. Bees that kept apart by themselves died of cold, but those that huddled together in crowds lived warm enough throughout the winter. The more there were of ’em thewarmer they kept, and the less food they needed. And so, as the winters got longer and colder, the bee-colonies increased, until at last, from force of habit, they took to keeping together all the year round. So you see, like as not, ’tis experience as has brought ’em to build their cities of to-day, just as experience, or the One ye never mention, has put the same thing into the hearts o’ men.”
A sudden flaw of wind struck the little cottage with a sound like thunder, and made the cut-glass lustres on the mantle tinkle and glitter in the yellow candle-glow. The old bee-man stopped, with his pipe half-way to his mouth, nodded gravely towards the window, in a kind of obeisance to the elements, and then resumed his theme.
“But there’s a many things about bees,” he said, “that no man ’ull come to the rights of, until all airthly things is made clear in the Day o’ Days. The great trouble and hindrance to bee-keeping is the swarm, and a good bee-master nowadays tries all he can to circumvent it. But the old habit comes back again and again, and often with stocks of bees that haven’t had a fit o’ it for years. Now, did ye ever think what swarming must have been in the beginning?”
He suddenly levelled the pipe-stem straight at my head.
“Well, ’tis all speckilation, but here’s my idee o’ it, for what ’tis worth. Take the wapses: they’re thousands of years behind the honey-bee in development, and so they give ye a look, so to speak, into the past. The end of a wapse-colony comes when the females are ready in November; and hundreds of them go off to hide for the winter, eachin some hole or crevice, until, in the warm spring days, each comes out to start a new and separate home. Well, perhaps the honey-bees did much the same thing long ago, when they were all mother-bees, in the time when the world was young. And perhaps the swarm-fever in a hive to-day is naught but a kind o’ memory of this, still working, though its main use is gone. The books here will tell ye o’ many other things brought about by swarming, right an’ good enough with the old-fashioned hives. Yet that gainsays nothing. Nature allers works double an’ treble handed in all her dealings. Her every stroke tells far and wide, like the thousand ripples you make when you pitch a stone in a pond.”
Therenever comes, in early April, that first bright hot day which means the beginning of outdoor work on the bee-farm, but I fall to thinking of old times with a great longing to have them back again.
Modern beemanship, at least to the wide-awake folk in the craft, brings in gold pieces now where formerly one had much ado to make shillings. But profit cannot always be reckoned in money. The old mysteries and the old delusions were a sort of capital that paid cent per cent if you only humoured them aright. Bee-men, who flourished when there was a young queen upon the throne, wore their ignorance as the parson his silk and lawn. It was something that set them apart and above their neighbours. All that the bees did was put to their credit, just for the trouble of a wise wag of the head and a little timely reticence. The organ-blower worked in full view of the congregation, while the player sat invisibly within, so the blower, after the common trend of earthly affairs, got all the glory for the tune.
There are no mysteries now in honey-craft. Science has dragooned the fairies out of sight and hearing as a man treads out sparks in the whin. But, though the mysteries have gone, the old music of the hives is still here as sweet as ever. This morning, when the sun was but an hour over the hilltop, I rose from my bed, and, coming down the creaking stair through the silence and half-darkness, threw the heavy old house-door back. At once the level sunshine and the song of bees and birds came pouring in together. There was the loud humming of bees in the leafing honeysuckle of the porch, and the soft low note of the hives beyond. In its plan to-day Warrilow Bee-farm reveals the whole story of its growth from times long gone to the present. All the hives near the cottage are old-fashioned skeps of straw, covered in with three sticks and a hackle. A little way down the slope the ancient bee-boxes begin, eight-sided Stewartons mostly, with the green veneer of decades upon some of them. Beyond these stand the first rack-frame hives that ever came to Warrilow; and thence, stretching away down the sunny hillside in long trim rows, are the modern frame-bar hives, spick and span in their new Joseph’s coats of paint, with the gillyflowers driving golden shafts between them, until they reach the line of sheds—comb and honey-stores, extracting-house, and workshops—marking the distant lane-side.
As I stood in the doorway, caught by the mesmeric sheen of the light and the beauty of the morning, thehumming of the bees overhead grew louder and louder. There were no flowers as yet to attract them, but in early April the dense canopy of honeysuckle here is always besieged with bees, directly the sun has warmed the clinging dewdrops. These were the water-carriers from the hives. Water at this time is one of the main necessities of bee-life. With it the workers are able to reduce the thick honey and the dry pollen to the right consistency for consumption, and can then generate the bee-milk with which the young larvæ are fed. Later on in the day the water-fetchers will crowd in hundreds to the oozy pond-side down in the valley—every bee-garden has its ancestral drinking-place invariably resorted to year after year. But thus early the pond-water is too cold for safe transport by so chilly a mortal as the little worker-bee; so Nature warms a temporary supply for her here where the dew trembles like drops of molten rainbow at the tip of each woodbine leaf.
I drank myself a deep draught from the well that goes down a sheer sixty feet into the virgin chalk of the hillside, and fell to loitering through the garden ways. Though it was so early, the little oil-engine down below in the hive-making shed was already coughing shrilly through its vent-pipe, and the saw thrumming. Here and there among the hives my men stooped at their work. The pony was harnessing to the cart, and would soon be plodding the three-mile-long road to the station with the day’s deliveries of honey. By all laws of duty I should be down there, taking my row of hives with the rest—master and men side by side like a string of turnip-hoers—busy at the spring examinationwhich, as all bee-men know, is the most important work of the year. But the very thought of opening hives, now in the first warm break of April weather or at any time, filled me with a strange loathing. So it never used to be, never could be, in the old days whose memory always comes flooding back to me at this season with such a clear call and such a hindrance to progress and duty. Then I had as little dreamed of opening a hive as opening a vein. I should have done no more than I was doing now—passing from one old straw skep to another through the sweet vernal sunshine, my boots scattering the dew from the grass as I went, and looking for signs that tell the bee-man nearly all he really needs to know. I shut my ears to the throaty song of the engine. I heard the cart drive away without a thought of scanning its load. I got me down in a little nook of red currant flowers under the wall, where the old straw hives were thickest, and gave myself up to idle dreams, dreams of the bees and bee-men of long ago.
I should be splitting elder, thought I; splitting the long, straight wands to make feeding-troughs. I called to mind doing it, here on this self-same bench near upon fifty years ago, with my father, the woodman, sitting at my elbow learning me. We split the wands clean and true, scooped out the pith from each half, and dammed up its ends with clay. Then, with a handful of these crescent troughs and a can of syrup, we went the round of the garden together looking for stocks that were short of stores. When we found one, we pushed the hollow slip of elder gently into the hive-entrance as far as it would go, and filled it with syrup, filling itagain and again throughout the day as the bees within drank it dry.
A queer figure my father cut in his short grey smock and his long lean bent legs encased in leathern gaiters, legs between which, when I was little, and trotting after him, I had always a fine view of the sky. He was never at fault in his estimate of a hive’s prosperity. The rich clear song and steady traffic of a well-to-do bee-nation he knew at once from the anxious note and frantic coming and going of a starvation-threatened hive. It was the tune that told him. Nowadays we just rip the coverings from a hive and, lifting the combs out one by one, judge by sheer brute-force of eyesight whether there be need or plenty. “One-thirty-two!”—from my sunny seat under the pink currant blossom I can hear the call of the foreman to the booking ’prentice down in the bee-farm—“One-thirty-two—six frames covered—no moth—medium light—brood over three—mark R.Q.” R.Q. means that the stock is to be re-queened at the earliest opportunity. She has been a famous queen in her time—One-thirty-two. This would have been her fourth year, had she kept up her fertility. But “brood over three”—that is to say, only three combs with young bees maturing in them—is not good enough for progressive, up-to-date Warrilow in April, and she must be pinched at last. In the common course, I never let a queen remain at the head of affairs after her second season. Nine out of ten of them break down under the wear and stressof two summers, and fall to useless drone-breeding in the third.
Already the sun has climbed high, and yet I linger, though I know I should be gone an hour ago. The darkness, far away as it seems, will not find all done that should be done on the bee-farm, toil as hard as we may. For these sudden hot days in spring often come singly, and every moment of them is precious. To-morrow the north wind may be keening under an iron-grey sky, and pallid wreaths of snow-flakes weighing down the almond-blossom. So it happened only a year ago, when on the twenty-fifth of April I must clear away the snow from the entrance-boards of the hives. It is, I think, the unending round of business—the itch that is on us now of finding a day’s work for every day in the year in modern beecraft—which has had most to do with the changed times. The old leisure, as well as the old colour and mystery, has gone out of bee-keeping. Between burning-time in August and swarming-time in May there used to be little else for the bee-master to do but smoke his pipe and ruminate and watch the wax flowing into the hives. For we all believed that the little pellets of many-tinted pollen which the bees constantly carry in on their thighs were not food for the grubs in the cells, but wax for the comb-building. I could believe it now, indeed, if I might only sit here long enough; but the busy voices are calling, calling, and I must be gone.
Amongthe innumerable scraps of more or less erroneous information on hive-life, dished up by the popular newspapers in course of the year’s round, there is occasionally one which is sure to grip the curious reader’s attention. No one expects nowadays to read of the honey-bee without being set agape at the marvellous; but, really, when he is gravely told that the nurse-bees in a hive actually give the breast to their young, suckling them with a secreted liquid which is nothing more or less than milk, the ordinarily faithful newspaper student is entitled to be for once incredulous.
The thing, however, in spite of its grotesque improbability, comes nearer to the plain truth than many another item of bee-life more often encountered and unquestionably accepted. There are veritable nurse-bees in a hive, and these do produce something not unlike milk. In about three days after the egg has been deposited in the comb-cell by the queen, or mother-bee, a tiny white grub emerges. The feeding of this grub is immediately commenced by the bees in charge of the nursery quarters of thehive, and there is administered to it a glistening white substance closely resembling thick cream.
Analysts tell us that this bee-milk, as it is called, is highly nitrogenous in character, and that it has a decidedly acid reaction. It is obviously produced from the mouths of the nurse-bees, and appears to be digested matter thrown up from some part of the bee’s internal system, and combined with the secretions from one or more of the four separate sets of glands which open into different parts of the worker-bee’s mouth. The power to secrete this bee-milk seems to be normally limited to those workers who are under fourteen or fifteen days old. After that time the bee runs dry, her nursing work is relinquished, and she goes out to forage for nectar and pollen, never, as far as is known, resuming the task of feeding the young grubs. But if the faculty is not exercised, it may be held in abeyance for months together. This takes place at the close of each year, when we know that the last bees born to the hive in autumn are those who supply the milk for the first batches of larva raised in the ensuing spring.
It is difficult to keep out the wonder-weaving mood when writing of any phase of hive-life, and especially so when we have this bee-milk under consideration. For all recent studies of the matter tend to prove several facts about it not merely wonderful, but verging on the mysterious.
In the first place, its composition seems to be variable at the will of the bees. The white liquid is supplied to the grubs of worker, queen, and drone, and not only is its nature different with each, but it is even possible that this may be farther modifiedin the various stages of their development. It is well ascertained that the physical and temperamental differences between queen and worker-bee, widely marked as they appear, are entirely due to treatment and feeding during the larval stage. That the eggs producing the two are identical is proved by the fact that these can be transposed without confounding the original purpose of the hive. The queen-egg placed in the worker-cell develops into a common worker, while the worker-egg, when exalted to a queen’s cradle, infallibly produces a fully accoutred queen bee. The experiment can also be made even with the young grubs, provided that these are no more than three days old, and the same result ensues.
A close study of the food administered to bees when in the larval stage of their career is specially interesting, because it gives us the key to many otherwise inexplicable matters connected with hive-life. We do not know, and probably never shall know, how mere variation in diet causes certain organs to appear and certain other bodily parts to absent themselves. If the difference between queen and worker-bee were simply one of development, the worker being only an undersized, semi-atrophied specimen of a queen, there would be little mystery about it. But each has several highly specialised organs, of which the other has no trace, just as each has certain functions reduced to mere rudimentary uselessness, which, in the other, possess enormous development and a corresponding importance.
Clearly the food given in each case has peculiar properties, bringing about certain definite invariableresults. We are able, therefore, to say positively that most of the classic marvels of bee-life are built up on this one determined issue, this one logical adjustment of cause and effect. The hive creates thousands of sexless workers and only one fertile mother-bee. It limits the number of its offspring according to the visible food supplies or the needs of the commonwealth. It brings into existence, when necessity calls for them, hundreds of male bees or drones, and when their period of usefulness is over it decrees their extermination. When the queen’s fecundity declines, it raises another queen to take her place. It can even, under certain rare conditions of adversity, manufacture what is known as a fertile worker, when some mischance has deprived it of its mother-bee and the materials for providing a legitimate successor to her are not forthcoming. And all these results are primarily brought about by the one means, the one vehicle of mystery—this wonderful bee-milk playing its part at all stages in the honey-bee’s life from her cradle to her grave.
For to track down this subtly-compounded elixir through all its various uses one must take a survey of almost the whole round of activities in the hive. The food of the young larva, whether of queen or worker, for the first three days after the eggs are hatched, seems to consist entirely of bee-milk. The drone-grub gets an extra day of this richly nitrogenous diet. And for the remaining two days of the grub stage of the bee’s life milk is given continuously, but, in the case of the worker and drone, in greatly diminished supply. Its place during these two days is largely taken, it is said, byhoney and digested pollen in the worker’s instance, and by honey and raw pollen for the males.
The queen-grub alone receives bee-milk, of a specially rich kind and in unlimited quantity, for the whole of her larval life. This “royal jelly,” as the old bee-masters termed it, is literally poured into the capacious queen-cell. For the whole five days of her existence as a larva she actually bathes in it up to the eyes. But, as far as is known, she receives no other food during this time. The regular order of her development, and of that of the worker-bee, during the five days of the grub stage has been carefully studied, and it is curious to note that the very time when the queen’s special organs of motherhood begin to show themselves coincides exactly with the moment at which the worker-grub’s allowance of bee-milk is cut down and other food substituted.
This, no doubt, explains why these organs in the adult worker-bee are so elementary as to be practically non-existent, and accounts for the queen’s generous growth in other directions. But it leaves us completely in the dark as to the reason for the worker’s subsequent elaboration of such organs as the pollen-carrying device, the so-called wax-pincers, and the wax-secreting glands, of which the queen possesses none. Nor are we able to see how the giving or withholding of the bee-milk should furnish the queen with a long curved sting and the worker with a short straight one; nor how mere manipulation of diet can result in making the two so dissimilar in temperament and mental attributes—the worker laborious, sociable, almost preternaturally alert of mind, and withal essentiallya creature of the open air and sunshine; the queen dull of intelligence, possessed of a jealous hatred of her peers, for whom all the light and colour and fragrance of a summer’s morning have no allurements, a being whose every instinct keeps her, from year’s end to year’s end, pent in the crowded tropic gloom of the hive.
But the bee-milk as well as being the main ingredient in the larval food, has other and almost equally important uses. It is supplied by the workers to the adult queen and drones throughout nearly the whole of their lives, and forms an indispensable part of their daily diet. And this gives us a clue in our attempt to understand, not only how the population of the hive is regulated, but why the males are so easily disposed of when the annual drone-massacre sets in. By giving or depriving her of the bee-milk, the workers can either stimulate the queen to an enormous daily output of eggs or reduce her fertility to a bare minimum; and, as for the drones, it is starvation that is the secret of their half-hearted, feeble resistance to fate.
Yet though we may recount these things, and speak of this mysterious essence called bee-milk as really the mainspring of all effort and achievement within the hive, it is doubtful whether we have solved the greatest mystery of all about it. Of what is it composed, and whence is it derived? The generally-accepted explanation of its origin is that it is pollen-chyle regurgitated from the second stomach of the bee, combined with the secretions from certain glands of the mouth in passing. But the most careful dissections have never revealed anything like bee-milk in any part of the bee’sinternal system. Its pure white, opaque quality has absolutely no counterpart there: nor, indeed—if we are to believe latest investigations—does pollen-chyle exist at all in either the first or second stomach of the bee, whence alone it could be regurgitated. Bee-milk, it would seem, is still a physiological mystery, and so may remain to the end of time.
Countrywanderings towards the end of summer, even now when the twentieth century is two decades old, still bring to light many ancient and curious things. Within an hour of London, and side by side with the latest agricultural improvements, you can still see corn coming down to the old reaping-hook, still watch the plough-team of bullocks toiling over the hillside, still get that unholy whiff of sulphur in the bee-gardens where the old-fashioned skeppists are “taking up” their bees.
Burning-time came round usually towards the end of August, sooner or later according to the turn of the season. The bee-keeper went the round of his hives, choosing out the heaviest and the lightest stocks. The heaviest hives were taken because they contained most honey; the lightest because, being short of stores, they were unlikely to survive the winter, and had best be put to profit at once for what they were worth. Thus a complete reversal of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest was artificially brought about by the old bee-masters. The most vigorous strains of bees were carefully weeded outyear by year, and the perpetuation of the race left to those stocks which had proved themselves malingerers and half-hearts.
There was also another way in which this system worked wholly for the bad. If a hive of bees reached burning-time with a fully charged storehouse, it was probably due to the fact that the stock had cast no swarm that year, and had, therefore, preserved its whole force of workers for honey-getting. Under the light of modern knowledge, any stall of bees that showed a lessened tendency towards swarming would be carefully set aside, and used as the mother-hive for future generations; for this habit of swarming, necessary under the old dispensation, is nothing else than a fatal drawback under the new. The scientific bee-master of to-day, with his expanding brood-chambers and his system of supplying his hives artificially with young and prolific queens every third year, has no manner of use for the old swarming-habit. It serves but to break up and hopelessly to weaken his stocks just when he has got them to prime working fettle. Although the honey-bee still clings to this ancient impulse, there is no doubt that selective cultivation will ultimately evolve a race of bees in which the swarming-fever shall have been much abated, if not wholly extinguished; and then the problem of cheap English honey will have been solved. But in ancient times the bee-gardens were replenished only from those hives wherein the swarming-fever was most rampant. The old bee-keepers, in consigning all their heavy stocks to the sulphur-pit, unconsciously did their best to exterminate all non-swarming strains.
The bee-burning took place about sunset, or as soon as the last honey-seekers were home for the night. Small circular pits were dug in some quiet corner hard by. These were about six or eight inches deep, and a handful of old rags that had been dipped in melted brimstone having been put in, the bee-keeper went to fetch the first hive. The whole fell business went through in a strange solemnity and quietude. A knife was gently run round under the edge of the skep, to free it from its stool, and the hive carefully lifted and carried, mouth downwards, towards the sulphur-pit, none of the doomed bees being any the wiser. Then the rag was ignited and the skep lowered over the pit. An angry buzzing broke out as the fumes reached the undermost bees in the cluster, but this quickly died down into silence. In a minute or two every bee had perished, and the pit was ready for the next hive.
That this senseless and wickedly wasteful custom should have been almost universal among bee-men up to comparatively recent times is sufficiently a matter for wonder; but that the practice should still survive in certain country districts to-day well-nigh passes belief. If the art of bee-driving—a simple and easy method by which all the bees in a full hive may be transferred unhurt to an empty one, and that within a few minutes—were a new discovery, the thing might be condoned as all of a piece with the general benightedness of mediæval folk. But bee-driving was known, and openly advocated, by several writers on apiculture at least a hundred years ago. By this method, just as easy as the old and cruel one, not only do the entire stores of each hive fall into the undisputedpossession of the bee-master, but he retains the colony of bees complete and unharmed for future service. He has secured all the golden eggs, and the goose is still alive.
Those who desire to make a start in beemanship inexpensively might do worse than adopt a practice which the writer has followed for many years past. As soon as the time for the bee-burners’ work arrives, a bicycle is rigged up with a bamboo elongation fore and aft. From this depend a number of straw skeps tied over with cheese-cloth. A bee-smoker and a set of driving-irons complete the equipment, and there is no more to do than sally forth into the country in search of condemned bees.
It is usually not difficult to persuade the cottage apiarist to let you operate on his hives. As soon as he learns that all you ask for your trouble is the bees, while you undertake to leave him the entire honey-crop and apour-boireinto the bargain, he readily gives you access to his stalls. The work before you is now surprisingly simple. A few strong puffs of smoke into the entrance of the hive under manipulation will effectually subdue the bees. Then the hive is lifted, turned over, and placed mouth upwards in any convenient receptacle—a pail or bucket will do, and will hold it as firmly as need be. Your own travelling-gear now comes into use. One of the empty skeps is fitted over the inverted hive. The two are pinned together with an ordinary meat-skewer at one point, and then the skep is prised up and fixed on each side with the driving-irons, so that the whole looks like a box with the lid half-raised. Now you have merely to take up a position in front of the two hives, andbegin a steady gentle thumping on the lower one with the palms of the hands.
At first, as the combs begin to vibrate, nothing but chaos and bewilderment are observable among the bees. For a moment or two they run hither and thither in obvious confusion. But presently they seem to get an inkling of what is required of them, and then follows one of the most interesting, not to say fascinating, sights in the whole domain of bee-craft. Evidently the bees arrive at a common agreement that the foundations of their old home have become, from some mysterious cause or other, undermined and perilous; and the word goes forth that the stronghold must be abandoned without more ado. On what initiation the manœuvre is started has never been properly ascertained; but in a little while an ordered discipline seems to spread throughout the erstwhile distracted multitude. In one solid hurrying phalanx the bees begin to sweep up into the empty skep. Once fairly on the march, the process is soon completed. In eight or ten minutes at most, the entire colony hangs in a dense compact cluster from the roof of your hive. Below, brood-combs and honey-combs are alike entirely deserted. There is nothing left for you to do now but carefully to detach the uppermost skep: replace the cheese-cloth, thus securing your prisoners for their journey to their new home; and to set about driving the next stock.
Thebee-master, explaining to an interested novice the wonders of the modern bar-frame hive, often finds himself confronted by a very awkward question. He is at no loss for words, so long as he confines himself to an enumeration of the hive’s many advantages over the ancient straw skep—its elastic brood and honey chambers, its movable combs interchangeable with all other hives in the garden, its power of doubling and trebling both the number of worker-bees in a colony and the amount of harvested honey; above all, its control over sanitation and the breeding of unnecessary drones. But when he is asked the question: Who invented this hive which has brought about such a revolution in bee-craft? his eloquence generally comes to a dead stop. Perhaps one in a hundred of skilled modern bee-keepers is able to answer the query. But the ninety-nine will tell you the bar-frame hive had no single inventor; it came to its latter-day perfection by little and little—the conglomerate result of years of experience and the working of many minds.
“Ancient cottage ruin showing recesses for hives”
This is, of course, as true of the modern bee-hive as it is of all other appliances of world-wide utility. But it is equally true that everything must have had a prime inception at some time, and through some special human agency or other; and, in the case of the bar-frame hive, the honours appear to be pretty equally divided between two personages widely separated in the world’s history—Samson and Sir Christopher Wren.
Perhaps these two names have never before been bracketed together either in or out of print; yet that the association is not a fanciful, but in all respects a natural and necessary one will not be difficult to prove.
The story of how Samson, albeit unconsciously, first gave the idea of the movable comb-frame to an English bee-master is probably new to most apiarians. As to whether the cloud of insects which Samson saw about the carcase of the dead lion were honey-bees or merely drone-flies, we need not here pause to determine. We are concerned for the moment only with one modern explanation of the incident. This is that, although honey-bees abominate carrion in general, in this particular case the carcase had been so dried and emptied and purified by the sun and usual scavenging agencies of the desert as to leave nothing but a shell—a very serviceable makeshift for a bee-hive, in fact—consisting of the tanned skin stretched over the ribs of the lion.
In the summer of 1834 a certain Major Munn was walking among his hives, pondering the ancient Bible narrative, when a sudden brilliant idea occurred to him. Like most advanced bee-keepersof his day, he had long grown dissatisfied with the straw hive, and his bees were housed in square wooden boxes. But these, although more lasting, were nearly as unmanageable as the skeps. The bees built their combs within them on just the same haphazard plan; and, once built, the combs were fixed permanently to the tops of the boxes. Now, the idea which had occurred to Major Munn was simply this: He reflected that the combs built by the bees in the dry shell of the lion-skin were probably attached each to one of the encircling ribs; so that, when Samson took the honey-comb, all he need have done was to remove a rib, bringing the attached comb away with it. Thereupon Major Munn set to work to make a hive on the rib-plan, which was composed of a number of wooden frames standing side by side, each to contain a comb and each removable at will. Since that time numberless small and great improvements have been devised; but, in its essence, the modern hive is no more than the dried lion-skin distended by the ribs, as Samson found it on that day when he went on his fateful mission of wooing.
The part played by Sir Christopher Wren in the evolution of the bar-frame hive, though not so romantic, was fraught with almost equal significance to modern bee-craft. Movable comb-frames were as yet undreamed of in Wren’s time, nearly two hundred years before Major Munn invented them. But Wren seems to have been the discoverer of a principle just as important. This was what latter-day bee-keepers call “storification.” Wren’s hive consisted of a series of wooden boxes, octagonal in shape, placed one below the other, withinter-communicating doors, and glass windows in the sides of each section. Up to that date bee-hives had been merely single receptacles made of straw, plastered wattles, or wood. When the stock had outgrown its dwelling there was nothing for it but to swarm. But by the device of adding another story below the first one, when this was crowded with bees, and a third or even a fourth if necessary, Wren was able to make his hive grow with the growth of his bee-colony or contract with its post-seasonal decline. He had, in fact, invented the elastic brood-chamber, which alone enables the bee-master to put in practice the one cardinal maxim of successful bee-keeping—the production of strong stocks.
Wren’s octagon storifying hive seems to have been plagiarised by most eminent bee-masters of his day and after with the naïve dishonesty so characteristic among bee-men of the time. Thorley’s hive is obviously taken from, indeed, is probably identical with, that of Wren. The hive made and sold by Moses Rusden, King Charles II.’s bee-master, is of almost exactly the same pattern, but it is described as manufactured under the patent of one John Geddie. This patent was taken out by Geddie in 1675, and Geddie would appear to be the arch-purloiner of the whole crew. For it is quite certain that, having had one of Wren’s hives shown to him, he was not content with merely copying it, but actually went and patented the principle as his own idea.
But Wren’s hive, good as it was in comparison with the single-chambered straw skep or wooden box, still lacked one vital element. Although heand his imitators had realised the advantage of an expanding bee-hive, this was secured only by the process of “nadiring,” or adding room below. Thus the upper part of Wren’s hive always contained the oldest and dirtiest combs, and as bees almost invariably carry their stores upwards, the production of clear, uncontaminated honey under this system was impossible. It remained for a Scotsman, Robert Kerr, of Stewarton, in Ayrshire, to perfect, some hundred and fifty years later, what Wren had so ingeniously begun.
Whether Kerr—or “Bee Robin,” as he was called by his neighbours—ever saw or heard of hives on Sir Christopher Wren’s plan has never been ascertained. But plagiarism was in the air throughout those far-off times, and there is no reason to think Kerr better than his fellows. In any case, the “Stewarton” hive, like Wren’s, was octagon in shape, and had several stories; but these stories were added above as well as below. By placing his empty boxes first underneath the original brood-chamber, to stimulate increase of population, and then, when the honey-flow began, placing more boxes above to receive the surplus honey, “Bee Robin” succeeded in getting some wonderful harvests. His big supers, full of snow-white virgin honey-comb, were soon the talk of Glasgow, where he readily sold them. Imitators sprang up far and near, and it is only within the last twenty-five or thirty years that his hives can be said to have fallen into desuetude.
But probably his success was due not more to his invention of the expanding honey-chamber than to two other important innovations which he effectedin bee-craft. The octagonal boxes of Wren had fixed tops with a central hole, much like the straw hive still used by the old-fashioned bee-keepers to this day. “Bee Robin” did away with these fixed tops, and substituted a number of parallel wooden bars from which the combs were suspended, the spaces between the bars being filled by slides withdrawable at will. He could thus, after having added a story to his honey-chamber, allow the bees access to it by withdrawing his slides from the outside: and when the super was filled with honey-comb, the slides were again employed in shutting off communication, whereupon the super could be easily removed.
This, however, though it greatly facilitated the work of the bee-master, did not account for the large yields of surplus honey, which the “Stewarton” hive first made possible. In the light of modern bee-knowledge, it is plain that a big honey-harvest can only be secured by a corresponding large stock of bees, and Robert Kerr seems to have been the originator of what was nothing less than a revolution in the craft. Hitherto the bee-keeper had estimated his wealth according to the number of his hives, and the more these subdivided by swarming, the more prosperous their owner accounted himself. But “Bee Robin” reversed all this. He housed his swarms not singly, but always two at a time; and he made large stocks out of small ones by the simple expedient of piling the brood-boxes of several colonies together. In a word, it was the “Dreadnought” principle applied to the peaceful traffic of the hives.