Itis well enough to consider the scientific side of hive-life for its intrinsic interest, to treat it for what it really is—one of the most absorbing studies available for leisure hours. But the honey-bee is something more than a wonder-maker, or a peg on which to hang dilettante moralisms. Rightly treated and exactly understood, she can be made of great use in the world.
There are two things in this England of ours which profoundly astonish all who love bees, and have a true conception of their possibilities. Travel where you may in the land, the last thing you are likely to meet with is a bee-farm, or even a few hives in a cottage-garden; while every yard of your way has its nook of blossom, and every mile its stretch of flowery pasture, where, in sober truth, tons of honey are annually running to waste. All this could be garnered and sold to the people at little trouble and great profit, if only enterprise would wake up from its island-lethargy and stretch forth the hand. But the years dribble uselesslyby, and nothing is done. Here and there a wide-awake husbandman gets a little township of hives together, sells in the neighbourhood all the honey his bees make, and puts to his pocket a gold and silver lining. But this is only a drop in the ocean, and the British people must send abroad for their honey, which they do to the pretty tune of more than £30,000 a year.
Hitherto, reasoning backward from effect to cause, it would seem that farming has been remunerative only when undertaken on a large scale; but those who can read the signs of the times tell us that the age, just dawning to the country-side, will be the age of the small man. And this must mean that the hereditary aristocracy among crops—wheat, oats, barley—will slowly give place to little-culture: in a word, that the land will be made to produce, not the things that tradition and our yeoman family pride have ordained as the be-all and end-all of farming, but the minor, humble necessities for which each town and village should look to the good brown earth immediately about it, but at present looks in vain. Farmers’ ladies may then no longer sit in their drawing-rooms and ride in their carriages, but that will be a change for the simpler, more proportionate. Those who live in towns have little conception of it; but the country-dweller knows well what complexity and luxury have got into the old English farmhouses, for all the outcry about hard times; how the farmer’swife no longer goes to her dairy, nor makes any of the good old farmhouse things that served to uphold country England in days gone by; and how the master-agriculturists now are the sinews of the great London Stores, while the little local shopkeepers are left to the field-labourer with his twelve or fifteen shillings a week.
For the class of small-holders that must now multiply throughout the length and breadth of the land, there is awaiting an enterprise—a source of livelihood—as yet hardly tapped. A stock subject of envy with most artisans is the capitalist who leads an easy life while his factory hands toil for him. But if the small-holder will take up bee-keeping, he too can look on, to a large extent, while his thousands of winged labourers are filling his storehouse with some of the most useful and saleable merchandise in the world. It is a truism in commerce that a good supply creates a demand just as certainly as that the universal want of a thing stimulates its production. One of the needs in England to-day is a full, good, and cheap supply of honey; and when this is forthcoming there will be little fear but that the present demand will increase hand over hand.
There are many reasons why the people should choose honey for their principal food rather than the beet sugar which is now so largely consumed. In the first place, honey is a pure, natural, undoctored sweet, while in the manufacture ofordinary sugar the use of more or less noxious chemicals seems to be indispensable. When a stock of bees must be artificially fed, and common grocers’ sugar is used for the purpose, the result is generally that half the stock is poisoned by the chemicals with which the sugar has been treated at the mill. And if this is its effect on bees, the inference must be that it cannot prove altogether wholesome for men. But its purity is not the chief reason why honey should be the universal sweet-food of the people. Honey is the ordinary sugar of nectar concentrated and converted into what is chemically known as grape-sugar; and thus, in ripe honey, the first and most important part of digestion is already effected before it leaves the comb. This explains why so many delicate people, and particularly children, can assimilate food sweetened with honey, when they can take no other form of sweet.
Doctors are continually finding some new virtue in honey. Its gently regulating action has been long known, and there is good authority for stating that there is not an organ in the human body which does not benefit from its habitual use. In all wasting diseases, and triumphantly in consumption, it will prevail as an up-builder when everything else fails. There is no doubt at all that cases of consumption have been entirely cured by a liberal diet of honey; and, notoriously, honey is the main ingredient in nearly all patent medicinesfor diseases of the chest and throat. Therapeutic hints from laymen are generally looked upon askance by medical men—at least, by those of the old-fashioned type; yet, on the chance that this page may come under the eye of some of the more elastic-minded, the thing may be hazarded. There are many who believe in it, and with good reason, as a sovereign specific where the disease is a wasting one. It is nothing else than the once famous Athole Brose, which, as all Scottish bee-keepers know, consist of equal parts of good thick honey, preferably from ling-heather, and of cream, and of mature Scotch whisky from the pot-still. Little and often is the rule for its administration, but, unlike most old wife’s remedies, faith has nothing to do with its wonder-working. Scepticism is a soil in which it seems to flourish as well as any.
The man of business, resolved to take up bee-keeping as a livelihood, must, at the outset, decide on what scale he will carry the matter through. There are two aspects of the thing, each more alluring than the other, according to the temperament and point of view. There is the Simple Life and the bee-garden—a life spent in the green quiet of an English village, within reach of a market town, where the produce of the hives may be disposed of. And there is the greater enterprise, the foundation of a bee-farm on an extensive scale, and on the most approved scientific principles, where the object is to supply thegreat central markets at a distance rather than the immediate local needs.
In the establishment of a bee-farm the first care must be the choice of a suitable district. The nature of the surrounding country must largely govern the systems on which the farm can be most profitably worked. The first maxim in successful beemanship is to get all hives filled to the brim with worker-bees by the time the great honey-flow sets in. This time, however, varies according to the district. In the orchard-country we need bees early; in heather-districts we want them late. In south-west England, where the country is half fruit-ground and half moorland, the hives must be huge in population both late and early. But where the bee-keeper follows the sheep-farmer—and there is no better guide to honey than the sheep—his true policy is to work his colonies slowly and steadily up to their greatest strength by the time the main feed-crops come into blossom, which is seldom before the middle of May. And all these considerations land us on the brink of a very vexed question in modern bee-craft—whether bees should be artificially fed, and if so, how and when?
If only the purest cane-sugar is used, and the syrup well boiled and never burnt, there is nothing to say against the practice on the score of harm to the stocks. Where early bees are wanted, it is absolutely necessary to give them a continuoussupply of sugar-syrup from the first moment that breeding commences in the hives. Chemically, the sweet constituent in nectar is almost identical with that from the sugar-cane; and sugar-syrup has this advantage over honey given—that it more nearly simulates the natural flow. The bees responsible for the nursery-work in the hive and the regulation of the queen’s fecundity, are young bees that have never yet flown. They can, therefore, only judge of the progress of the season by the amount of nectar and pollen coming into the hive. Where this is steadily increasing day by day—and it is this regular natural progress in prosperity which the bee-keeper must strive to imitate in artificial feeding—the nurse-bees gain confidence, and brood-raising forges rapidly ahead.
But sugar-syrup and pea-flour are not natural foods for bees, and there is little doubt that a prolonged course of such diet tends to lower the tone and stamina of the race, and thus may prepare the way for disease. The golden rule in the matter seems to be that artificial feeding should be resorted to only where strength of stocks is necessary, to secure the harvest, or where actual starvation threatens. In purely heather-districts, when the big population is quite early enough if it is to hand in late June, nothing short of imminent starvation should induce the bee-master to give artificial, and therefore unavoidably inferior, food. In sheep-country the same rule holds. Except inthe most unfavourable years, a hive, headed by a young and vigorous queen, can be relied upon to get itself into the finest fettle by the time the main crops are ready for exploitation. In this case the beeman has only to make certain from time to time that no stock is in absolute want of the ordinary means of subsistence.
But in those warm, favoured regions of the south-west, the lands of the apple-blossom and the heather, where there is a very early and a very late harvest to be gathered, a different system must be pursued. Here we touch on the second grand principle of successful bee-keeping—the necessity for having in all hives only the most prolific mother-bees. For profitable honey-getting a queen should seldom be kept beyond her second year. After that she is usually of little account, and should be superseded, either by the bee-master or the bees. But where a queen has been over-stimulated by feeding to raise an immense population in the spring of the year, she is rarely capable of another supreme effort in the autumn. The best policy, therefore, if the heather-harvest is an important one, is to remove the old queens as soon as the spring work is over, and to substitute for them queens that are in their best season, but at the beginning of their resources instead of at the end. In this way another huge army of workers is soon born to the hive, and the double harvest is secured.
Hiving a swarm
On the question of the best hive to use in commercial bee-keeping, on either a large or small scale, it is hard to particularise. Generalisation, however, is not difficult here. Every bee-master has his own ideas as to details, but all are happily agreed on the main constructive principles. Experience has fairly well decided that a good queen, under the modern system of intensive culture, will require for her brood a comb-surface of about 1,800 square inches. A brood-nest of smaller capacity than this is liable to cramp her operations at their highest, and anything in excess of it will simply mean so much new honey lost to the super-chambers, where alone the bee-master requires it. Honey stored in the brood-nest, except during the off-season, is loss instead of gain. The best hive, therefore, will contain just as many brood-combs in movable frames as will ensure the right capacity; and all comb-frames throughout the bee-farm must be of the same size, so that they will be strictly interchangeable among the various hives. This is a vital point in successful bee-culture, because it enables the master not only to equalise the strength of his stocks by transferring combs of hatching brood from one to the other; but he can also give to penurious stocks frames of sealed honey from the abundance of their neighbours, and he can unite the weak colonies, thus rendering all strong.
For the rest, the hives must be so made that heat will be perfectly retained in the cold season,and as perfectly excluded during the sultriest time of year. Double walls round the brood-chamber are a necessity in the changeable British climate, where chilly days are always probable during ten months out of the twelve.
As well as honey-production, the bee-farmer will find an equal source of profit in the production of wax. Just as there is nothing like leather, beeswax holds its own as a marketable commodity in spite of paraffin substitutes. But if it is almost universally degraded by adulteration, the fault lies with the beemen, who have never seriously attempted to meet the demand for it. Wax-production on a large scale is perfectly feasible, and there is little doubt that it could be developed into an important British industry, as it used to be in mediæval days. Yet these are times of revolution: the honey-bee may yet find herself entirely restored to her old national avocation—of bringing light to our darkness, and to our bodies one of the best and purest of foods.
Itis a quality of English sunshine that it comes and goes capriciously, so that no man may be sure of the comradeship of his shadow from day to day. But when there is sunshine in England, it always seems an abiding, permanent force. The grey of yesterday, and the patter-song of the rain on the leaves, were only a dream. You were sleeping under the changeless blue of a summer night, and had but a vision of weeping, drab skies, gone now with the joy that comes in the morning. And to-morrow, when perhaps the old wild scurry of storm-cloud is alive overhead, and all the house resounds with the runnel-music from the pouring eaves, still it will be only a dream. Of a surety you will tell yourself so, as the sun breaks through the griddle of cloud, and the wind relents, and the Dutchman can get to his tailoring; and when you are stepping out amidst the swamp and glitter and rehabilitation of life, as glad of it all as the finches and butterflies that sweep on before you down the lane. Thesun shines: you know it has always shone, changeless as Time itself.
With such a faith—unfounded and therefore uncontestable—I came under the glow of one brave June morning, threading field after field of blossoming clover until I stood at the gate of the bee-garden over against the hill. With its name I had long been familiar, for in the county paper there was always the little five-line advertisement, quaintly worded, announcing honey for sale. But I had never yet seen it, nor, indeed, ever set foot in this part of the good Sussex land. So, on this brimming June morning, giving rein for once to the indolent Shank’s mare of moods that is fated to carry me, I set out into the bright sloth, the joyous hastelessness, of the day; and came at length to my destination—to the bee-garden that nestles under the green Downland hills.
It was girt about with a tall hedge of hawthorn, smothered in snowlike blossom, with just that rosy tinge upon it which is the first hectic of decay. Beyond the hedge I could see, stretching aloft, green apple-boughs, whose full-blown posies were alive with the desperate humming energy of countless bees. There was a blue wisp of smoke trailing idly away from a chimney-stack, all that could be seen of the snug thatched cottage within; and there were voices, a leisurely baritone, a sudden peal of laughter high-pitched and obviously a woman’s, and now and then a bar or two of anold song sung in an intermittent, absent-minded way.
In one of the pauses of this song, I raised the latch of the gate. Its sharp click drew to its full lean height a figure at the end of the garden, which was bending down in the midst of a wilderness of hives. As the man came towards me coatless, his rolled-up shirt-sleeves baring wiry brown arms to the hot June sun, I took in all the busy, quiet picture. The red-tiled, winding path, the sea of old-fashioned garden-flowers on every hand, billows of lilac and red-may and laburnum, shadowy blue deeps of forget-me-not, scarlet tulips amidst them like lighthouses, and drifting shallows of amber mignonette. A decent house stood hard by, its windows bright and clean as diamond-facets. There was a gay flicker of linen on a line beyond. An old dog lolled in a straw-filled barrel. A cat kept company with a milk jug on the spotless doorstep. And everywhere there were beehives, each of a different harmonious shade of colour, not ranged in stilted rows, but scattered here and there in twos and threes in the orderless order beloved of bees and unsuburban men.
The bee-master had keen grey eyes, set deep in a sun-blackened, honest face, and the ever-ready tongue of him was that of the beeman all the world over. He was ripe and willing to talk of his work, explaining what he was, and what he had done, as we slowly wandered through hisdomain. He was a Londoner—he told me—at least, that was his fate half a dozen years ago—a City clerk, pale as the ledger-leaves that fluttered through his fingers from nine to six of the working day. And at home, in a dreary desert of housetops called Nunhead—whither may an unkind fate never lure me—his sisters sewed for a living, white-faced as himself. But one day, in an old second-hand book-shop, he lit upon a threepenny treasure—a book on the management of bees. He read it as his train crawled homeward on one stifling, freezing, fog-bound winter’s night; and there and then, in the mean, dirty cattle-box of a third-class carriage, in fancy the bee-garden was inaugurated, that has since developed into all I saw around me on that brave morning in June.
It was a long time in the doing, he told me, as we sauntered among the busy hives, speaking with a delightful Sussex intonation already veneered upon his Cockney brogue—a long and weary and scraping time. There was money to be saved, the capital needed for the enterprise; and this was no easy matter out of a total family income of forty shillings a week. But at last it was done, and well done. There came a day when the three of them shook the dust of Nunhead from their feet, and took over possession of the little tumbledown cottage with its bare half-acre of neglected ground. Well, those were hard times to begin with—he said, with an unaccountable relish in therecollection;—but now, look how all was changed! He waved a triumphant, proudly proprietary arm around him. The cottage was sound and well furnished throughout. The three or four bought hives, with which he had started his business, had multiplied into sixty or seventy, all made by his own hands. Where had he got the bees? Well, that threepenny book had taught him a secret—the art of bee-driving. Nearly all the cottagers for miles round were in the habit of sulphuring their bees to get at the honey. The first autumn, and every autumn since then, he had gone to his neighbours and told them he would take the bees out of the hives for them, and leave them all the combs and a good trink-geld into the bargain, if they would let him have the bees for his trouble. And they were more than willing. And thus he had gradually built up his little principality of hives.
But, the profit of the thing? This, indeed, was nothing much to boast of. He sold all the honey and wax he got, sending it away, for the most part, by post, and extending the circle of his custom by little and little with every year. Taking the bad years with the good, he had made a net return of £2 for every hive; in bumper-seasons it was always much more. It was not a great deal, but there were only three of them, and their wants were simple. Their greatest needs—fresh air, peace, and quiet, the healthful life of thecountry—these were to be had for nothing at all. And as for clothes—you never know, until you give over trying to keep up appearances, how very little appearances count in the world. At any rate, for them, the whole thing was a complete success. There were men round about that country-side who farmed whole provinces, and still grumbled; but here was he, getting peace and plenty from half an acre; and as for the girls, they did nothing but laugh and sing all day long.
Thus we wandered and talked; and I—feigning ignorance of bee-matters, lest he might think I was but carrying coals to Newcastle in clumsy charity—bought honey, and asked many questions; and slowly the entire meaning of what had been done by these emancipated slaves of City clerkdom was revealed. The bee-master pushed his old straw hat back over his clever forehead, and lit the most comfortable pipe I had ever set eyes on. He had evidently thought the whole thing out long ago, and got it down to its essential elements.
A forest apiary
“What we are doing here,” he said, “could be done by hundreds of others who are still in London in what was once our old plight. Large bee-farms are all very well, but they are more or less a thing of the future—something that is still to be evolved out of twentieth-century needs. But the bee-garden has its immediate use and place in every district where there is an average population.People generally have got out of the habit of eating honey because it is so seldom on sale in the shops; but if you steadily and continuously remind them of it, they will buy, and soon grow to wonder how they did without it for so long. But it must be set before them in an attractive way. Run-honey must be bright and pure to look at, and neatly bottled and labelled. If you sell honey in the comb, the section-boxes must be spotlessly clean and white. In that old book that first led me to bee-keeping, it says that only the English bee should be kept, because it is a better honey-gatherer. But, from the salesman’s point of view, there is a much more weighty reason for abjuring all foreign strains of bees. English bees leave a thin film of air between the honey and the cell cappings, and the result is that the comb always looks perfectly white. But nearly all foreigners fill their cells to the brim, and this means that the finest honeycomb will have a dark and dirty appearance, and no one will be tempted to buy. That is the sort of thing a business-man thinks of first, so the old training days in London have not been altogether without their use even here.”
The song, aloof and desultory, that I had heard from the garden-gate, was growing clearer as we walked; and now we turned the house-corner, and came upon more hives, with a neat, girlish figure busy among them; and, hard by, a tiny laundry-shed, wherein I caught a glimpse of brown armsdeep in a wash-tub, and heard the last stanza of the vagulous song.
“Hetty, there,” explained the bee-master, “helps in the garden, and— Helps, did I say? Why, she is far and away a better hand at it than I. There is so much in hive-work that needs the light touch which only a woman can give. And Deborah, she keeps house for us. Did you know that the word Deborah was Hebrew for a honey-bee? But come and see where I make the hives on winter days, and where we sling the honey, and fill the super-crates with the sections, and all the rest of it.”
He showed me then his workshop and a little gauze-windowed shed where there was a homemade honey-extractor—a cunning, centrifugal thing by which the combs could be emptied and restored unbroken to the bees, to be charged again and again. And there was a storehouse, where long rows of honey-jars, and stacks of sections, and blocks of pale yellow wax were waiting for the purchaser, and a packing-shed where the postboxes of corrugated cardboard were made up. Finally there was pointed out to me, in a far-off corner of the garden, a donkey—shaggy, well-fed, placidly browsing—and, under a neighbouring pent-roof, a little cart that was a curiosity in its way. Its wooden tilt was made to represent a big beehive, and on it was painted the name of the bee-garden and a list of hive-products which itcarried for sale. The bee-master put an admiring hand upon it.
“It was all Hetty’s idea,” he said. “London girls for pluck, you know! And she goes into the town with it once a fortnight in the season; takes it away crammed full, mind, and never brings back an ounce! Somehow or other, I think those girls ought to change names!”
Journeying back to the railroad-station under the eternal English sunshine and through the chain of blossoming fields, I listened to the chant of the bees around me; and though it was the familiar sound of a lifetime, there was something in it then which I had never heard before. The rich note rose and fell; died down to silence as the path led through impregnable red-clover; swelled again as the land paled to the rosy hue of the sainfoin; burst out into a loud, glad symphony where a patch of charlock blent its despised, uncoveted gold with the farmer’s drill. “You thought you knew our ways of life from Alpha to Omega”—so seemed to run, in fancy, the wavering refrain. “You have pried upon us day and night, in season and out of season. You have chloroformed us, vivisected us, torn our dead sisters limb from limb to feed the cruel, glittering eyes of that binocular of yours. You have come at last to think that there was nothing about us, within or without or round about, that you had not got to know. And here a commonCity clerk, turned tail on his hereditary duty, has shown you, in one short hour, a whole sheaf of things about us which you—Peeping Tom that you are!—in a whole life’s keyhole-prying have never guessed. Out upon you! You deserve to have to do with nothing better than bumble-bees for the rest of your days!”
For the more I thought of little bee-gardens, such as the one I had just visited, established here, there, and everywhere throughout the land, the plainer it became that this, after all, was a mission for the honey-bee that had quite escaped me; and the fonder of the idea I grew. With bee-keeping on a grand scale there was the difficulty that an apiary might become too large for the resources of the country about it, although it is all but certain that crops grown specially for bees can be made to pay. But a small garden could never exhaust the land within its necessary three-mile radius, and all the nectar its bees could gather would be obtained free. Nunhead has done it gloriously, thought I, tramping steadily onward through the clover. And why not all the other Nunheads that hem in the great cities? There must be plenty who love the dust and din, and are willing to stop there; so the little band of bee-gardeners will never be missed.
And there was something else I thought of, too, as I strode along under the English sunshine which lasts for ever, swinging my box of superfluous, yet much-prized honey as I went.
The song and that pleasant ripple of laughter—they were in my ears still, and mingling with the labour-song of the wayside bees. Now, only a dozen miles or so, away over the hill-tops in the blue Sussex weald, I knew of just such another bee-garden, where two brothers—not Londoners this time, but true-born Downland lads—had well established themselves, were getting comfortably off, but were still single men. And only a week ago they had deplored this fact to me, and— But avast! Match-making was never yet to be reckoned part of the Lore of the Honey-Bee.
THE END
Advice to Bee-masters, Butler,35
After-swarms,189
Athol Brose,261
Ancient Roman Hives,22
Anglo-Saxon Bee-keeping,22
Antennæ of Bee, Functions of,155
Ants and Bees, Analogy in Swarming,178
Aristotle’s Bee-lore,2
Artificial Food for Bees,262
Barat-Anac, the Country of Tin,19
Bee-bikes,139
breeding,48
burning,48
city: problems involved in construction,202
colony, Progress of,97
craft, Mediæval,46
culture in Ancient Britain,21
driving,271
farming, Success in,262
garden, Profits of,271
gardens, Scarcity of, in England,257
generation,33
hives in First Century,4
in Mythology,v
keeping as a Livelihood,261
in Anglo-Saxon Times,24
Modern,47
larva, Spinning of Cocoon,137
Bee life, Study of,146
the Old-Age Problem in,134
lines,224
masters, Mediæval,29
milk, its Nature and Uses,123166
monarchy,32
scouts in Swarming,186
stings,52
superstitions,40
under Microscope,148
Bees and Birds,87
and Holy Wafer, Story of,37
and Spiders,41
Cleansing-flights,90
English and Foreign,220
from Dead Lion,46
Generated in Flowers,32
in Ancient Egyptian Times,6
Knowledge of, among Ancients,30
Bees’ Sense of Smell,62
Breathing-system of Bee,163
British Beer (?) in Third Century,B.C.21
Brood-cells, Cappings of,140
Dimensions of,108
nest, Globular Form of,31
Butler’s “Feminine Monarchie,”33
Chapel built by Bees,36
Classic Bee-fathers,28
Comb built Upwards,217
cell, Reasons for Hexagonal Shape of,135206
Comb-construction,99,197,204
Evolution of,135
Mathematics of,208
Supposed Laws of Mutual Interference and Pressure in,212
Preservation of Verticality in,215
Communal Mind in Hive,69
Corsica’s Tribute of Wax to Romans,16
Country Housewife’s Garden,42
Dead Bees, Method of Bringing to Life,46
Decline of Mead-drinking among Saxons,26
Discipline in Hive,14
Divine Origin of Bees,6
Drone,14,41,43,74,118
and Worker-eggs, Theory of Laying,122
His Place in the Hive,237
Drone-breeding Queen,110
cells,213
fly,10
Drones in Winter,246
Mid-day Flight,64
Slaughter of,244
Egg-stealing by Bees,111
Emergency Comb,201
English Black Bee,76
Ethelwold’s Allowance of Mead to Monks,24
Evolution in Hive-life,xviii,79
Eyes of Bee, Compound and Simple,154
Fanning-army,59,92
Strength of Air-current,62
Fertile Worker, Anomaly of,144
First Bee-hunter,xi
Flight of Bee, Mechanism of,157
Extent of,224
of the Drones,240
Foot of Bee, Construction of,151
Freemasonry of Bee-keeping,195
“Further Discovery of Bees,” by Rusden, 1679,31
Glandular System of Bee,167
Guard-bees of Hive,62
Hexagonal Principle in Hive,134
Hive, Division of Labour in,83
life, System and Order in,128
Preparation for Winter,253
Hiving Swarms,182
Honey as Hair-restorer,45
a Manufactured Product,222
and Sugar: Comparative Values as Food,259
“Honey-bearing Reed,”23
Honey-bee, Origin of,78
bees, Varying Intelligence of,143
bee’s Year, Beginning of,84
comb, Construction of,137
crops,226
dew,226
flow, Duration of,95,221
from the Skies,5
Imports,258
in Mediæval Cookery,23
In Middle Ages,24
Medicinal Properties of,44,260
Preparation of, for Market,273
Huber’s Leaf-hive,30
Ideal Hive, The,265
Infant Mortality in Bee-life,63
Insects: Reasons for Bodily Construction,158
Isle of Honey,18,22
Italian Bee,77
Jaws of Bee, Construction of,154
Larva-cocoons, Differences in138
Larva, Hatching of,72
Laying Queen’s Attendants,107
Legs of Bee,149
Life of the Hive,54
of the Queen,119
Longevity of Bee,15
Master-Bees,42
Matriarchy in the Hive,xiii
Mead: Ancient Recipe,26
in Anglo-Saxon Times,24,25
like Canary-sack,27
making, Modern,26
Modern Bee-culture: Its Infuence on Bee-life,190
Hive, Capacity of,95
Morat,25
Moses Rusden, King’s Bee-Master,31
Nectar: Temperature required for its Secretion,228
Night in the Bee-Garden,60
Nursery-work in the Hive,71
Oil of Wax,45
Old Bee-garden,51
Overseers in Hive,64
Oxen-born Bees,7
Oxymel,44
Parthenogenesis,105,122
Pigment,25
Pliny and the Bee,11
Pliny’s Mirror-stone Hive,30
Poison-sac of Bee: Its Contents,223
Pollen from Evening Primrose,34
gathering,32,55
loads, Homogeneity of,57
Sources of,56
Prehistoric Man and Honey-Bee,x
Propolis: Its Nature and Uses,57,204