o Z ser ~< Se ere BY TICKNE Nee R ae aes eek ee, ALBERT R. MANN LIBRARY NEw YorK STATE COLLEGES OF AGRICULTURE AND HOME ECONOMICS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY EVERETT FRANKLIN PHILLIPS BEEKEEPING LIBRARY Gift of Lyman C. Root ‘ornell University Library viii Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu3 1924003215070 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW AN IDLER IN THE WILDS SIDELIGHTS OF NATURE PHE COMB-BUILDERS, WITH CHAIN OF WAX-MAKING BEES THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE BY TICKNER EDWARDES AUTHOR OF ‘“ THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW” WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS SECOND EDITION METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published . . August 1908 Second Edition . . October 1908 TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BRITISH BEE-KEEPERS’ ASSOCIATION, THOMAS WILLIAM COWAN, F.L.S., ETC., TO WHOSE LABOURS AND RESEARCHES THE WRITER, AND ALL OTHER BEE-KEEPERS, ARE UNDER A LASTING OBLIGATION, CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION: THE OLDEST CRAFT UNDER THE SUN ix CHAPTER fi. THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE - I I], THE ISLE OF HONEY 18 Ill. BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 28 IV. AT THE CITY GATES 50 Vv. THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE - 67 VI. EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 84 VII, THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN - 94 VII, THE BRIDE-WIDOW - 117 IX. THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 127 X. A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 146 XI, THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 174 XII. THE COMB-BUILDERS 195 XI, “‘WHERE THE BEE SUCKS” - 219 XIV. THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 233 XV. AFTER THE FEAST - 248 XVI. THE MODERN BEE-FARM 257 XVII. BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE - 267 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE COMB-BUILDERS MOSES RUSDEN’S BEE-BOOK BUTLER’S “BEES MADRIGALL” JOHN THORLEY IN HIS STUDY INVERTED STRAW HIVE AN OLD SUSSEX BEE-HOUSE COMB-FRAME FROM MODERN HIVE WINTER IN THE BEE-GARDEN DRONE-BROOD AND WORKER-BROOD QUEEN-BEE LAYING A QUEEN-CELL - THE HONEY-BEE, IN FACT AND FANCY - Frontispiece FACING PAGE BROOD-COMB, SHOWING ALL STAGES OF BEE-LIFE THE BEE-NURSERY A SWARM IN MAY A MAMMOTH SWARM HIVING THE SWARM THE SWARM HIVED HONEYCOMB CONSTRUCTION COMB BUILT UPWARDS IN THE STOREHOUSE QUEEN-BEE IN OFF-SEASON BAD BEEMANSHIP A FOREST APIARY vill 28 34 INTRODUCTION THE OLDEST CRAFT UNDER THE SUN NE of the oldest and prettiest fables i ancient mythology is that which deals wit the origin of the honey-bee. It was to Meliss and her sister Amalthea, the beautiful daughte1 of the King of Crete, that the god Jupiter wa entrusted by his mother Ops, when Saturn, hi father—following his custom of devouring hi children at birth—sought to make the usual me: of this, his latest offspring. The story is variously rendered by ancier writers. Some say that bees already existed i the world, and that Amalthea was only a goa whose milk served to nourish the baby-god, i addition to the honey that Melissa obtained fror the wild bees in the cave where Jupiter lay hidder Another account has it that the bees themselve were drawn to his place of concealment by tk noise made by his nurses, who beat continuall ix x THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE on brazen pans to keep the sound of his infant lamentations from the ears of his -raVening sire. Thenceforward the bees took over the charge of him, bringing him daily rations of honey until he grew up and was able to hold his own in the Olympian theogony. In either case Jupiter showed his gratitude towards his preservers in true celestial, fashion. It was a very ancient belief among the earliest writers that, in the single instance of the honey-bee, the ordinary male-and-female principle was abrogated, and that the propagation of the species took place by miraculous means. In ex- planation of this, we are told it was a special gift from Jupiter in acknowledgment of the unique service rendered him. In one version of the fable, and in the words of a famous bee-master who wrote in 1657, “Jupiter, for so great a benefit, bestowed on his nurses for a reward that they should have young ones, and continue their kind, without wasting themselves in venery.” In the other, and probably much older form of the legend, Melissa, the beautiful Princess of Crete, was her- self changed by the god into a bee, with the like immaculate propensities; and thenceforward the work of collecting honey for the food of man— that honey which, down to a very few centuries from the present time, was universally believed to INTRODUCTION xi be a miraculous secretion from heaven—was con- fided to her descendants. / Apart, however, from the old dim tales of ancient mythology; where there is a romance to account for all beginnings of the world and every- thing upon it, any attempt to trace back the art of bee-keeping to its earliest inception cannot fail to bring us to the conclusion that it is inevitably and literally the oldest craft under the sun. Thousands of years before the Great Pyramid was built, bee-keeping must have been an estab- lished and traditional occupation of man. It must have been common knowledge, stamped with the authority of the ages, that a beehive, besides its toiling multitudes, contained a single large ruling bee, divine examplar of royalty; for how else would the bee have been chosen to represent a King in the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols? But it is not only within the limit of historical times, however remote, that evidences of bee-culture, or at least of man’s use of honey and wax in his daily life, are to be found or inferred. So far back as the Bronze Age it is certain that wax was used in casting ornaments and weapons. A model of the implement was first made in some material that would perish under heat. This was imbedded in clay, and the model burnt out, after which the ‘ty — xii THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE mould thus formed was filled with the molten metal. These models, no doubt, were in many cases carved out of wood; but it is certain that another and more ductile material was often used. Bronze ornaments have been found with thumb- marks upon them, obviously chance impressions on the original model faithfully reproduced. And the substance of these models could hardly have been anything else than beeswax. But speculation on the probable antiquity of bee-keeping need not stop here. The best authorities estimate that human life has existed on the earth for perhaps a hundred thousand years. The earliest traces of man, far back in the twilight of palzeolithic times, reveal him as a hunting and fighting animal, in whom the instinct to cultivate the soil or domesticate the creatures about him had not yet developed. Later on in the Stone Age—but still in infinitely remote times—it is evident that he tamed several creatures, such as the ox, the sheep, and the goat, keeping them in confinement, and killing them for food as he re- quired it, instead of resorting to the old ceaseless roaming after wild game. At this time, too, he took to sowing corn, and even baking or charring some sort of bread. It must be remembered that if a hundred thousand years is to be set down as * INTRODUCTION xiii the limit of man’s life on the earth, probably the development of other living creatures, as well as most forms of vegetable life, took place immeasur- ably earlier. The chances are that the world of trees and flowering-plants, in which aboriginal man moved, differed in no great degree from the world of green things surrounding human life to- day. It is certain that the apple, pear, raspberry, blackberry, and plum were common fruits of the country-side in the later Stone Age, for seeds of all these have been found in conjunction with neolithic remains. Evidence of the existence of the beech and elm—the latter a famous pollen- yielder—has been discovered at a very much earlier time. All the conditions favourable to insect-life must have been present in the world ages before man appeared in it; and insect-life undoubtedly existed then in a high state of de- velopment. It would be as unreasonable, there- fore, not to infer that the honey-bee was ready on the earth with her stores of sweet-food for man, as that man did not speedily discover that store, and make it an object of his daily search, just as he went forth daily to hunt and kill four-footed game. There is, of course, a great deal of difference between a chance discovery of a wild-bee’s nest, xiv THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE as a common and expected incident in a day’s foraging, and the systematic preservation and tending of beehives as a source of daily food. While it is reasonable to assume that the first men used honey as an article of diet, it is probable that they were a wandering race, never halting for long in the same locality, and therefore un- likely to be bee-keepers in the accepted sense of the word. They depended, no doubt, on the wild honey-stores which they happened to find in their entourage for the time being. But the first sign of civilisation must have been the gradual lessen- ing of this nomadic instinct. Tribes would come to take permanent possession of districts rich in the game, as well as the fruits and tubers, necessary for their daily food. At the same time the haunts of the wild bees would be discovered, their enemies kept down or driven away, the places where the swarms pitched annually noted, and thus the first apiary would have been founded, probably long before any attempt at cultivation of the soil or domestication of the wild creatures for food was made. Biologists generally regard hunting as the oldest human enterprise under the sun; but, adopting their well-known method of deductive reasoning, it seems possible to make out a rather better case INTRODUCTION xv for beemanship in this category. The primeval huntsman must have found much difficulty in bringing down his game, and still more in securing it, when maimed, but yet capable of eluding final capture. For this purpose some sort of retrieving animal, fleeter of foot and more cunning than its master, must have been even more necessary in primzeval times than it is in the modern days of the gun. There seems to be no evidence of man indicating the most elementary civilisation without sure signs also that he had trained and used some sort of dog to help him in his daily food-forays. But man must have existed long before civilisation can be said to have come within age-long distance of him. In these times, beset with enemies, he must have built his hut nest-like in some high, impregnable tree, out of reach of night-prowling foes ; and it is scarcely conceivable that the dog was his companion under these conditions. More probably he lived, for the most part, on fruits and honey-comb, and such of the small creatures as he could capture with his naked hands. Thus, in all likelihood, the first hunter was a bee-hunter. | at Eolithic man may have had his own rocky fastnéss or clump of hollow trees, where the wild bees con- gregated ; and with the coming of each summer he may have followed his swarms through the Xvi THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE glades of primzeval forests as zealously as any bee-keeper of the present day. Speculation of this kind is necessarily far-fetched and fantastic, and can be but half seriously under- taken with so small and inconsiderable a creature as the honey-bee. But it is interesting from one special, and not often adopted, point of view. There is no more fascinating study than that of the ancient civilisations of the world. Egypt 10,000 years ago, Babylon probably still earlier, China that seems to have stopped at finite perfec- tion in all ways that matter little, ages before the time of Abraham. But all these are of mushroom growth compared with the antiquity of bee-civilisa- tion. It is only a tale of Lilliput, of a microscopic people living and moving on a mimic stage. Yet, perhaps tens of thousands of years before man had made fire, or chipped a flint into an axe-head, these winged nations had evolved a perfect plan of life, and solved social problems such as are only just beginning to cloud the horizon of human existence in the twentieth century. And they, and their intricate communal polity, have not passed away into dust, as the great human nations of bygone ages have done, and as those of the present day may be destined to do, for all we can tell. Will a time come when we must learn from the INTRODUCTION xvii honey-bee or perish? We have still probably a few thousand years wherein to think it out, and prepare for it; but unless the world comes to an end, or human increasing-and-multiplying comes to an end, one earth will eventually become too small to hold us. With this thought in mind, a study of the honey-bee and the arrangements of hive-life, takes on a new interest. Supposing that the political economy of a beehive may be taken as a foreshadowing of the ultimate human state, there is no denying that we get a glimpse into an eminently disquieting state of things, at least from the masculine point of view. We see matriarchy triumphant ; the females holding supreme control in the State, and not only initiating all rules of public conduct, but designing and carrying through all public works. The male is reduced to the one indispensable office of sex, and even a single exercise of this is vouchsafed only to a few in a thousand. But to create the large and permanent army of workers necessary in a State such as this, and to recruit it wholly from the females, it became necessary to revise all rules of life from their very foundation. There must have been a great renunciation among the bees, male and female alike, when the resolve was made to leave the whole duty of procreation of their kind to one é xviii THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE pair alone of their number—one pair only out of every thirty thousand or so—in order that the rest could devote themselves to ceaseless, sexually unincommoded toil. This may be imagined as following on a great discovery, an epoch-making discovery, changing the whole face and future of bee-life—how, by the nursing and feeding of the young grub of the female bee, she could be atrophied into a mere, sexless, over-intellectual labourer, or glorified into a creature lacking, it is true, all initiative and almost all mental power, but possessing a body capable of mothering the whole nation. Here is socialistic political economy carried to its sternest, most logical conclusions. All is sacrificed for the good of the State. The individual is nothing: the race is everything. “Thorough” is the motto of the honey-bee, and she drives every theory home to its last notch. Men are pleased to call themselves bee-masters; but the best of them can do no more than study the ways of their bees, learn in what directions it is their will to move, and then try to smooth the way for them. The worker-bees collectively are the whole brains in the business, and the bee-keeper is as much the slave. of the conditions and systems they have inaugurated as they are themselves; while the INTRODUCTION xix queen-bee is the most willing, and, at certain seasons, the most laborious slave of them all. It is useless to deny that bee-polity, with its stern dead-reckoning of ingenuity, its merciless adherence to the demands of a system perfected through countless ages, has its unpleasant and even its revolting aspects. Nature is always wonderful, but not always admirable ; and a close study of the Life within the Hive brings out this truth perhaps more clearly than with any other form of life, humanity not excepted. Absolute communism implies incidental cruelty: it is only under a system of bland political compromise, of neighbourly give and take, that justice and mercy can ever be yoke-fellows. In the republic of bees, nothing is allowed to persist that is harmful or useless to the general good. Every individual in the hive seems to acquiesce in this common principle—either by choice or compulsion—from the mother-bee down to the last lazy drone, born into the brief plenty of waning summer days. In the height of the honey-flow, the State demands a storehouse filled to the brim ; and every bee keeps herself to the task unceasingly until death from overwork comes upon her, and her last load never reaches the hive. If the queen-bee grows old, or her powers of egg-laying prematurely fail, she is XxX THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE ruthlessly slaughtered, and her place filled by another specially raised by the workers to meet this contingency during her lifetime and in her full view. Drones are bred in plenty, plied with the richest provender in the hive, and allowed to wanton through their days of insatiate appetite, so that no young queen may go forth on her nuptial flight unchallenged. But when the last princess is happily mated, and safely home again in the warm, awaiting cluster, every drone is callously done to death, or driven out of the hive to perish. If hard times threaten, or the supply of stores is arrested, the old and worn-out members of the hive are exterminated, breeding is stopped, the unborn young are torn from their cradle-cells and destroyed, so that there may be as few mouths as possible to fill in the lean days to come. The signs of dawning prosperity or adversity are watched for, and the working population of the hive is either increased or checked, just as future | probabilities seem to indicate. But the most bewildering, most uncanny thing of all about this bee-republic is the fact that, in it, has been successfully solved the problem of the balance%of the sexes. While all other creatures in the universe bring forth their kind, male and female, in what seems a haphazard, unpremeditated way, INTRODUCTION xxi these mysterious hive-people cause their queen- mother to give them either sons or daughters according to the needs of the community. They lead her to the drone-cells, and she forthwith deposits.eggs that hatch out infallibly as drones ; and in the combs specially made wherein to rear the aborted females, the workers, the queen is caused to lay eggs that just as assuredly produce only the worker-bee. It is the oldest civilisation in the world, this wonderful commonwealth of the bee-people, and it is not unprofitable to examine it in the light - of ideas which are at present only flickering up _ uncertainly on the distant path, but which might "well broaden out some day into general confla- gration. It is conceivable that a time existed when the conditions of bee-life were very different from those we see to-day. Bees have drawn together into vast communities, just as men are slowly, but surely, gathering into cities. A time may come when individual existence outside the city may be as impracticable for men, as life has become for separate bee-families away from the hive ; and then there may arise a purely masculine dilemma. It may be that once the magnificent drone was of real consequence in domestic affairs. Bee-life may have consisted of numberless small xxii THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE families, each with its deep-voiced, ponderous father-bee, its fruitful mother, and its tribe of youngsters growing up, and in time setting forth to establish homes for themselves. There is no reason why each one of the thirty or forty thousand pinched virgins in a hive should not have become a fully developed, prolific queen-bee, if only the right food, in sufficient quantity, had been given her in her larval state. But the need for the single large community arose. The system of a single national mother was instituted. The great re- nunciation was made, for good or ill. And then the trouble, from the masculine point of view, began. It must be borne in mind that, strictly speaking, the honey-bee does not, and never did, possess a sting. What is commonly known as her sting is really an ovipositor, and it is as such that it is almost exclusively used by the modern queen-bee in every hive to-day. But when the first hordes of worker-bees were brought into the world, re- duced by the science of starvation to little more than sexless sinews and brains, they seemed to have conceived a terrible revenge on_ their ancestors. The useless ovipositor was turned into a weapon of offence, against which the drone’s magnificent panoply of sound and fury availed him nothing. Matriarchy was established at the INTRODUCTION xxiii point of the living sword. A pitiless logic over- ran everything. Intolerance of all the bright asides of life—the wine, the dance, the merry talk, and genial tarryings by the path, beloved of all drones, bee or human—darkened the day. And the result is only more honey, a vaster storehouse filled to the brim with never-to-be-tasted sweets, at a cost unfathomable, when the old larder would have sufficed for every real need, and life might still have been merry and leisurely. It is only a fable, far-fetched, fantastic, as any told to the Caliph in the “ Arabian Nights.” But there, again, the woman had her way, like the bee- woman before, and some day she and her kind may get it on a more ambitious scale. And then —what of the sword that was once a sewing- needle ? ‘Some are content with saying that they do it’ by Instinct, and let it drop there; but I believe God has given us something farther to do, than to invent names for things, and then let them drop.’’—A, I, Root. THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE CHAPTER I THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE “While great Cesar hurled War's lightnings by high Euphrates, ... even in that season I, Virgil, nurtured in sweet Parthenope, went in the ways of lowly Quiet.”— Fourth Book of the Georgics. T was in Naples—the Parthenope of the Ancients—that the “best poem by the best poet ” was written, nearly two thousand years ago. Essentially an apostle of the Simple Life, the cultured and courtly Virgil chose to live a quiet rural existence among his lemon-groves and his bee-hives, when he might have dwelt in the very focus of honour at the Roman capital; where his friend and patron, Mecenas, the prime minister ef Octavian, kept open house for all the great in literature and art. Modern bee-keepers, athirst for the American- isation of everything, give little heed nowadays to the writings of one whom Bacon has called “the I 2 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known.” And yet, if the question were asked, What book should first be placed in the hands of the beginner in apiculture to-day? no wiser choice than this fourth book of the Georgics could be made. For Virgil goes direct to the great heart of the matter, which is the same to-day as it was two thousand years ago. The bee-keeper must be first of all a bee-lover, or he will never succeed ; and Virgil’s love for his bees shines through his book from beginning to end. Of course, in a writer so deeply under the spell of Grecian influ- ences, it is to be expected that such a work would faithfully reproduce most of the errors immortalised by Aristotle some three hundred years before. But these only serve to bring the real value of the book into stronger relief. Through the rich in- crustation of poetic fancy, and the fragrant mytho- logical garniture, we cannot fail to see the true bee-lover writing directly out of his own know- ledge, gathered at first hand among his own bees. Virgil knew, and lovingly recorded, all that eyes and ears could tell him about bee-life; and it is only within the last two hundred years or so that any new fact has been added to Virgil’s store. All the writers on apiculture, from the earliest times down to the eighteenth century, have done little else than pass from hand to hand the fantastic errors of the ancient ‘‘ bee-fathers,” adding gener- THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 3 ally still more fantastic speculations of their own. And until Schirach got together his little band of patient investigators of hive-life about a hundred years ago, Virgil’s fourth Georgic—considered as a practical guide to bee-keeping—was still very nearly as well-informed and up-to-date as any. It is not, however, for its technical worth that the book is to be recommended to the apiarian tiro of to-day. All that has become hopelessly old-fashioned with the passing of the ancient straw- skep in the last generation. The intrinsic value of Virgil’s writings lies in their atmosphere of poetry and romance, which ought to be held in- separable, now as ever, from a craft which is prob- ably the most ancient in the world. Almost alone among country occupations to-day, bee-keeping can retain much of its entrancing old-world flavour, and yet live and thrive. But if the modern tend- ency to make the usual unlovely transatlantic thing of British honey-farming is to be checked, nothing will do more to that end than an early instillation of Virgil’s beautiful philosophy. Dipping into this fascinating poem—with its delightful blend of carefully told fact, and rich fancy, and quaint garnerings from records then extant, but now lost in the ages—we can recon- struct for ourselves a picture of Virgil’s country retreat near ‘sweet Parthenope,’ where he loitered, and mused, and wrought the faultless hexameters of the Georgics with so much care I=2 4 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE and labour, that the work took seven years to accomplish—which is at the rate:of less than a line a day. Virgil’s house stood, probably, on the wooded slope above the town of Naples, deep set in orange- groves and lemon-plantations, and in full view, to the north, of the snow-pinnacled Apennines, and, southward, of the blue waters of the Bay. Vesuvius, too, with its eternal menace of grey smoke, rose dark against the morning sun only a few leagues onward; and, at its foot, the doomed cities nestled, Pompeii and Herculaneum, then with still a hundred years of busy life to run. Bee-hives in Virgil’s day—as we can gather from certain ancient Roman bas-reliefs still in existence —were of a high, peaked, dome pattern, and they were made of stitched bark, or wattled osiers, as he himself tells us. Many of the directions he gives as to their situation and surroundings are still golden rules for every bee-keeper. The bee- garden, he says, must be sheltered from winds, and placed where neither sheep nor butting kids may trample down the flowers. Trees must be near for their cool shade, and to serve as resting- places when “the new-crowned kings lead out their earliest swarms in the sweet spring-time.” He tells us to place our hives near to water, or where a light rivulet speeds through the grass; and we are to cast into the water “large pebbles and willow-branches laid cross-wise, that the bees, THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 5 when drinking, may have bridges to stand on, and spread their wings to the summer sun.” Virgil’s method of hiving a swarm is almost identical with that followed by old-fashioned bee- men to this day. The hive is to be scoured with crushed balm and honeywort, and then you are to “make a tinkling round about, and clash the cymbals of the Mother ”—that is, of the goddess Cybele. The bees will forthwith descend, he tells us, and occupy the prepared nest. When the honey-harvest is taken, you are first to sprinkle your garments and cleanse your breath with pure water, and then to approach the hives “ holding forth pursuing smoke in your hand.” And the old-timebge-man of to- day takes his mug of small- beer as a necessary rité, and washes himself before handling his hives. But perhaps the great charm of the fourth Georgic consists, not in its nearness to truth about bee-life, but in the continual reference to the beautiful myths, and hardly.less attractive errors, of immemorial times, copied so faithfully by medizval writers, but not apt to be heard of by the learner of to-day unless he reads the old books. Virgil begins his poem by speaking of “ heaven- born honey, the gift of air,” in allusion to the belief that the nectar in flowers was not a secretion of the plant itself, but fell like manna from the skies. He seriously warns his readers of the disastrous effect of echoes on the denizens of a hive, and of 6 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE the hurtful nature of burnt crab-shells ; and tells us that in windy weather bees will carry abou little pebbles as counterpoises, “as ships take in sand-ballast when they roll deep in the tossing surge.” He was a firm believer in the Divine origin of bees. To all the ancients the honey-bee was a perpetual miracle, as much a sign and token of an omnipotent Will, set in the flowery meadows, as is the rainbow, to modern pietists, set in the sky. While all other creatures in the universe were seen to produce their kind by coition of the sexes, these mysterious winged people seemed to be exempt from the common law. Virgil, copying from much older writers, says, “they neither rejoice in bodily union, nor waste themselves in love’s languors, nor bring forth their young by pain of birth; but alone from the leaves and sweet-scented herbage they gather their children in their mouths, thus sustaining their strength of tiny citizens.” Just as marvellous, however—at least to the modern entomologist—will appear the belief, wide- spread among the ancients, and shared by Virgil, that swarms of bees can be spontaneously gener- ated from the decaying carcass of an ox. Virgil professes to derive his account of the matter from an old Egyptian legend, and he gives careful directions to bee-keepers of what he seems never to doubt is an excellent method for stocking an THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 7 apiary. There is a very old translation of the passage in the fourth book of the Georgics relat- ing to these self-generated bees, which is worth quoting, if only on account of its quaint medizeval savour. “First, there is found a place, small and narrowed for the very use, shut in bya leetle tiled roof and closed walles, through which the light comes in askant through four windowes, facing the four pointes of the compass. Next is found a two- year-old bull-calf, whose crooked horns bee just beginning to bud; the beast his nose-holes and breathing are stopped, in spite of his much kicking; and after he hath been thumped to death, his entrails, bruised as they bee, melt inside his entire , Skinne. This done, he is left in the place afore- prepared, fol aa his sides are put bitts of boughes, thyme, and fresh-plucked rosemarie. And all this doethe take place at the season when the zephyrs are first curling the waters, before the meades bee ruddy with their spring-tide colours, and before the swallow, that leetle chatterer, doethe hang her nest again the beam. In time, the warm humour beginneth to ferment inside the soft bones of the carcase; and wonderful to tell, there appear creatures, footless at first, but which soon getting unto themselves winges, mingle together and buzz about, joying more and more in their airy life. At last, burst they forth, thick as rain-droppes from a summer cloude, thick as arrowes, the which leave the clanging stringes 8 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE when the nimble Parthians make their first battel onset.” For a study in the persistence of delusions, this affords us some very promising material. In the first place, the generation of bees from putrescent matter is, and must always have been, an impossi- bility. If there is one thing that the honey-bee abhors more than another, it is carrion of any description. Indeed, putrid odours will often induce a stock of bees to forsake its hive alto- gether; so it cannot even be supposed that bees would venture near the scene of Virgil’s malodor- ous experiment, and thus give rise to the belief that they were nurtured there. But not only was this practice a recognised and established thing in Virgil’s time, but entire credence was placed in it throughout the Middle Ages down, in fact, to so late a time as the seventeenth century. It is on record that the experiment was carried through with complete success by a certain Mr. Carew, of Anthony, in Cornwall, at an even later date still. The practice, moreover, was of infinitely greater antiquity than even Virgil supposed. He was probably right in giving it an Egyptian origin, and this alone may date it back thousands of years. In Egypt the custom had a curious variant. The ox was placed underground, with its horns above the surface of the soil. Then, when the process of generation was presumed to be complete, the tips THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 9 of the horns were sawn off, and the bees are said to have issued from them, as out of two funnels. Nearly all the ancient writers, with the excep- tion of Aristotle, mention the practice in some form or other. Varro, writing half a century before Virgil, says, “it is from rotten oxen that are born the sweet bees, the mothers of honey.” Ovid gives the story of the Egyptian shepherd Aristeeus as enlarged upon by Virgil, and adds some specula- tions of his own. He suggests that the soul of the ox is converted into numberless bee-souls as a punishment to the ox for his lifelong depredations amongst the flowers and herbage, the bee being a creature that can only do good to, and cannot injure, vegetation. Manifestly, where there is so general, and so widely independent a corroboration of a story, some explanation must exist, which will alike bear out the truth and condone, or at least extenuate, the error. A careful examination of the various accounts of bee-swarms having been produced from decaying animal matter reveals one common omission in regard to them. All the writers are dgreed that dense clouds of bee-like insects are evolved ; and speak of these as escaping into the air and flying off, presumably in the immediate quest of honey. But no one bears testimony to honey having been actually gathered by these insects, nor is it recorded that they were ever induced to take possession of a hive, as ordinary 12 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE Elder, who was born in a.p. 23. He, too, deals with the ox-born bees; but the reader’s interest will centre for the most part in Pliny’s grave and careful account of the life and customs of the honey-bee, as commonly accepted among his con- temporaries. Very few indeed of the facts he so picturesquely details have any real foundation in truth. Like nearly all the classic writers, he had little more accurate knowledge of the life within the hive than we have of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. But he made up for this deficiency, as did all others of his time, by dipping largely into the stores of his own fancy as well as those of other people. His account of the origin and nature of honey is quaintly pleasant reading. ‘‘ Honey,” he says, ‘‘is engendered from the air, mostly at the rising of the constellations, and more especially when Sirius is shining; never, however, before the rising of the Vergiliz, and then just before day- break. . . . Whether it is that this liquid is the sweat of the heavens, or whether a saliva emanat- ing from the stars, or a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself—would that it had been, when it comes to us, pure, limpid, and genuine, as it was when first it took its downward descent. But, as it is, falling from so vast a height, attract- ing corruption in its passage, and tainted by the exhalations of the earth as it meets them; sucked, too, as it is, from off the trees and the herbage of THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 13 the fields, and accumulated in the stomachs of the bees, for they cast it up again through the mouth; deteriorated besides by the juices of flowers, and then steeped within the hives and subjected to such repeated changes :—still, in spite of all this, it affords us by its flavour a most exquisite pleasure, the result, no doubt, of its ethereal nature and origin.” Modern bee-keepers ascribe the varying quality in honey nowadays to the prevalence of good or bad nectar-producing crops during the time of its gathering, or to its admixture with that bane of the apiculturist—the detestable honey-dew. But Pliny set this down entirely to the influence of the stars. When certain constellations were in the _ ascendant, bad honey resulted, because their exuda- tions were inferior. Honey collected after the rising of Sirius—the famous honey-star of all the ancient writers—was invariably of good quality. But when Sirius ruled the skies in conjunction with the rising of Venus, Jupiter, or Mercury, honey was not honey at all, but a sort of heavenly nostrum or medicament, which not only had the power to cure diseases of the eyes and bowels, and ameliorate ulcers, but actually could restore the dead to life. Similar virtues were possessed by honey gathered after the appearance of a rainbow, provided—as Pliny is careful to warn us—that no rain intervenes between the rainbow and the time / of the bees’ foraging. 14 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE On the life-history of the honey-bee Pliny wrote voluminously. He tells us of a nation of industrious creatures ruled over by a king, dis- tinguished by a white spot on his forehead like a diadem. These king-bees were of three sorts— red, black, and mottled; but the red were superior to all the rest. He appears to accept, though guardedly, the old legend that sexual intercourse among bees was divinely abrogated in favour of a system of procreation originating in the flowers. He mentions a current belief—which must have been the boldest of heresies at the time—that the king-bee is the only male, all the rest being females, The existence of the drones he explains away very ingeniously. ‘They would seem,” he says, ‘to be a kind of imperfect bee, formed the very last of all; the expiring effort, as it were, of worn-out and exhausted old age, a late and tardy _ offspring.” The discipline in the hives was, according to Pliny, a very rigid affair. Early in the morning the whole population was awakened by one bee sounding a clarion. The day’s work was carried through on strict military lines, and at evening the king’s bugler was again to be observed flying about the hive, uttering the same shrill fanfaronade by which the colony was roused at daybreak. After this note was heard, all work ceased for the day, and the hive became immediately silent. His book abounds in curious details as to hive- THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 15 life. When foraging bees are overtaken in their expeditions by nightfall, they place themselves on their backs on the ground, to protect their wings from the dew, thus lying and watching until the first sign of dawn, when they return to the colony. At swarming-time, the king-bee does not fly, but is carried out by his attendants. Pliny warns in- | tending bee-keepers not to place their hives within sound of an echo, this being very injurious to the bees; but, he adds, the clapping of hands and tinkling of brass afford bees especial delight. He ascribes to them an astonishing longevity, some _living as long as seven years. But the hives must “be placed out of the reach of frogs, who, it seems, were fond of breathing into hives, this causing great mortality among its occupants. When bees need artificial food, they are to be supplied with raisins or dried figs beaten to a pulp, carded wool steeped in wine, hydromel, or the raw flesh of poultry. Wax, Pliny says, is best clarified by first boiling it in sea-water, and then drying it in the light of the moon, for whiteness. And in taking honey from the hives, a person must be well washed and clean. Malefactors are cautioned against approaching a hive of bees at any time. Bees, he assures us, have a particular aversion to a thief. To the latter-day practical bee-keeper, all these minute details given by the classic writers read very like useless and cumbersome nonsense ; and 14 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE On the life-history of the honey-bee Pliny wrote voluminously. He tells us of a nation of industrious creatures ruled over by a king, dis- tinguished by a white spot on his forehead like a diadem. These king-bees were of three sorts— red, black, and mottled; but the red were superior to all the rest. He appears to accept, though guardedly, the old legend that sexual intercourse among bees was divinely abrogated in favour of a system of procreation originating in the flowers, He mentions a current belief—which must have been the boldest of heresies at the time—that the king-bee is the only male, all the rest being females. The existence of the drones he explains away very ingeniously. ‘They would seem,” he says, ‘to be a kind of imperfect bee, formed the very last of all; the expiring effort, as it were, of worn-out and exhausted old age, a late and tardy _ offspring.” The discipline in the hives was, according to Pliny, a very rigid affair. Early in the morning the whole population was awakened by one bee sounding a clarion. The day’s work was carried through on strict military lines, and at evening the king’s bugler was again to be observed flying about the hive, uttering the same shrill fanfaronade by which the colony was roused at daybreak. After this note was heard, all work ceased for the day, and the hive became immediately silent. His book abounds in curious details as to hive- THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 15 life. When foraging bees are overtaken in their expeditions by nightfall, they place themselves on their backs on the ground, to protect their wings from the dew, thus lying and watching until the first sign of dawn, when they return to the colony. At swarming-time, the king-bee does not fly, but is carried out by his attendants. Pliny warns in- tending bee-keepers not to place their hives within sound of an echo, this being very injurious to the bees; but, he adds, the clapping of hands and tinkling of brass afford bees especial delight. He ascribes to them an astonishing longevity, some living as long as seven years. But the hives must “be placed out of the reach of frogs, who, it seems, were fond of breathing into hives, this causing great mortality among its occupants. When bees need artificial food, they are to be supplied with raisins or dried figs beaten to a pulp, carded wool steeped in wine, hydromel, or the raw flesh of poultry. Wax, Pliny says, is best clarified by first boiling it in sea-water, and then drying it in the light of the moon, for whiteness. And in taking honey from the hives, a person must be well washed and clean. Malefactors are cautioned against approaching a hive of bees at any time. Bees, he assures us, have a particular aversion to a thief. To the latter-day practical bee-keeper, all these minute details given by the classic writers read very like useless and cumbersome nonsense ; and 16 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE it seems matter for wonder that the bees contrived to exist at all under such ingeniously complicated mismanagement, born, as it was, of an ignorance flawed by scarcely a single ascertained fact. But the truth stands out pretty clearly that bee-keeping two thousand years ago was really a very large and important industry. Oneapiary is mentioned by Varro as yielding five thousand pounds of honey yearly, while the annual produce of another brought in a sum of ten thousand sesterces. Pliny mentions the islands of Crete and Cyprus, and the coast- country of Africa, as producing honey in great abundance. Sicily was famous for the good quality of its beeswax, but Corsica seems to have been one of the main sources of this. When the island was subject to the Romans, it is said that a tribute of two hundred thousand pounds’ weight of wax was yearly exacted from it. This, however, is such an astounding figure that it must be taken with a certain caution. Evidently the bees in the ancient world managed their business in fairly good fashion, in spite of the ignorance of their masters, or at least of the ancient chroniclers de re rustica. But it should always be borne in mind that the writers on husbandry and kindred subjects were seldom practical men. With the single exception, perhaps, of Virgil’s “‘ Georgicon,” these old books relating to apiculture bear unmistakable evidence of being, for the most part, merely compilations from writings still more THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 17 ancient, or heterogeneous gatherings together of hearsays and current fables of the time. It is certain that the men who were actually engaged in the craft of bee-keeping, and who knew most about it, wrote nothing at all. Probably they concerned themselves very little with the myths and fables of bee-craft, and owed their success to hard, practical, everyday experience, which is the surest, and perhaps the only, guide to-day. CHAPTER II THE ISLE OF HONEY F we are to accept all that the old Roman historians have put on record to the glory of their race, we must believe that their con- quering legions found everywhere barbarism, and left in its place the seeds of a high civilisation— high, at least, in the general acceptance of the word in those lurid, moving days. But it may well be questioned whether the Britain that Caesar first knew was as barbaric as it has been painted. We are accustomed to look upon Ceesar’s account of his earliest view of Albion —of Eilanban, the White Island, as the Britons themselves called it—as the first glance vouch- safed to us into the history of our own land. But this is very far from being the truth. British history begins with the record of the first voyage of the Phoenicians, who, adventuring farther than any other of their intrepid race, chanced upon the Scilly Isles and the neighbouring coast of Corn- wall, and thence brought back their first cargo of tin. 18 THE ISLE OF HONEY 19 And how long ago this is who shall say? The whereabouts of the Phoenician Barat-Anac, the Country of Tin, remained a secret probably for ages, jealously guarded by these ancient mariners, the first true seamen that the world had ever known. They were expert navigators, venturing enormous distances oversea, even in King Solomon’s time; and that was a thousand years before the advent of Cesar. In all likelihood they had been in fre- quent communication with the Britons centuries before the Greeks took to searching for this wonderful tin-bearing land, and still longer before the name Barat-Anac became corrupted into the Britannia of the Romans. And it is hardly to be supposed that a people of so ancient a civilisation, and of so great a repute in the sciences and refine- ments of life, as the Phcoenicians—a people from whom the early Greeks themselves had learned the art and practice of letters—could remain in touch, century after century, with a nation like the Britons without affecting in them enormous im- provement and development in every way that would appeal to so high-mettled and competent a race. For high-mettled and capable the Britons were even in those old, dim, far-off days. Cesar’s account of them, read between the lines, accords ill with the commonly accepted notion of a horde of savages, pigging together in reed hovels, and daubing their naked bodies blue to strike terror 2—2 20 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE into the equally savage minds of their island adversaries. We get a glimpse of a people much farther advanced in the arts of peace and war. In all probability they clothed themselves at ordinary times, picturesquely enough, in the furs of the wild animals, with which the island abounded; and it was only in war-time that they stripped and painted. Old prints have familiarised us with the sight of the sailors of Drake and Nelson stripped much in the same way; and the blue paint of Druidical times is not divided by so great a gulf as the ages warrant from the scarlet cloth and glittering brass-ware of nineteenth-century fight- ing-men. As armourers the ancient Britons must have been not immeasurably inferior to the Romans, and we are told that they excelled in at least one difficult craft, the making of all sorts of basket-ware. But there is other testimony, apart from Czsar’s, in favour of the view that they were by no means a barbarous people. Diodorus Siculus, who was Cesar’s contemporary, speaks of them as posses- sing an integrity of character even superior to that commonly obtaining among the Romans ; and Tacitus, writing about a century later, ascribes to them great alertness of apprehension, as well as high mental capacity. Protected as they were by the sea, it is probable that war entered to no large extent into their lives, and they were essentially a pastoral people. The cultured and daring \ THE ISLE OF HONEY 21 Phoenician traders are certain to have prospected the coast much farther eastward than is recorded, and thus to have materially hastened British advance in civilisation—at least, as far as the southern tribes were concerned. It has been claimed—on what evidence it is diffi- cult to determine—that the Romans, besides teach- ing the Britons all other arts of manufacture and husbandry, introduced the practice of bee-culture into the conquered isles. But Pliny, giving an account of the voyages.of Pytheas, which are sup- posed to have been undertaken some three hundred years before Cesar ever set foot here, mentions the Geographer of Marseilles as landing in Britain, and finding the people brewing a drink from wheat and honey. There is, however, another source of testimony on this point, of infinitely greater antiquity than any yet enumerated. Long before the Pheenician sailors discovered their tin- country, there were bards in Eilenban—the White Island—hymning the prowess of their Celtic heroes and the traditional doings of their race. These old wild songs were handed down from singer to singer through the ages, and many of them, still extant among the records of the Welsh bards, must be of unfathomable antiquity. These profess to describe the state of Britain from the very earliest beginnings of the human race. And in some of them, which are seemingly among the oldest, Britain is called the Isle of Honey, because 22 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE of the abundance of wild bees everywhere in the primeval woods. There would be little profit, and no little folly, in seeking to invest these old traditions with any more than their due signifi- cance. But there is much in a name. And it may be conjectured that if Britain was known among the early Druidical bards as the Isle of Honey, the natural conditions giving rise to the name were still prevalent, and reflected immemorially in the life of the people, when Cesar first saw them crowding the white cliffs above him, a huge-limbed, ruddy-locked, war-like race. He records that they possessed their herds of tame cattle and their cultivated fields; and it is reasonable to suppose that the hives of wattled osier that Virgil wrote of a century later had their ancient counterpart of woven basket hives in the British villages of the day. No doubt the Romans, during their second and permanent occupation, which did not take place until a hundred years after, taught the Britons their own methods of bee-management, and im- proved in numberless ways on the practice of the craft, which, among the British, was probably a very simple and rough-and-ready affair. But it was not until the Romans had gone, and the Anglo-Saxon rule was fairly established in the Island, that bee-keeping seems to have become one of the recognised national industries. The records bearing on the social life of the people at THE ISLE OF HONEY 23 that time are necessarily broken and scanty; but it is certain that honey, with its products, had become an important article of diet among all classes, high and low. It is difficult—here in the present time, when cane and beet-sugar, and even chemical sweetening agents, are in constant and universal use—to realise that, from the remotest times down to the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- turies, there was practically no other sweet-food of any description, except honey, in the world ; and to estimate, therefore, what a prominent place in the industries of each country bee-keeping must then have occupied. There was nothing else but honey for all purposes, and it is constantly men- tioned in the old monkish chronicles and the curious manuscript cookery-books that have sur- vived from the Middle Ages. It is true that the sugar-cane was known as far back as the first century a.p. Strabo, writing just before the commencement of the Christian Era, relates how Nearchus, who was Admiral of the Fleet to Alexander the Great, made an important voyage of discovery in the Indian Ocean, and brought back news of the wonderful ‘“honey- bearing reed,” which he found in use among the natives of India. There is a record that the Spaniards brought the sugar-cane from the East, and planted it in Madeira early in the fifteenth century. Thence its cultivation spread to the West Indies and South America, during that and 24 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE the following century. Throughout the Middle Ages it was in very restricted use among the richest and noblest families in Europe, Venice being then the centre of its distribution. But. cane-sugar was little else than a costly luxury of diet, or a vehicle in medicine, even among the highest in the land, until well into the seventeenth century, when it slowly began to oust honey from the popular favour. The chances are, however, that the middle and lower classes of England possessed, and could afford, no other sweetening agent but honey, for any purpose, down to about three hundred years ago. Among the Anglo-Saxons the beehives supplied the whole nation, from the King down to the poorest serf, not only with an important part of their food, but with drink and light as well. We read of mead being served at all the royal banquets, and in common use in every monastery. Even in those far-off days there were wayside taverns where drink was retailed; and the chief potion was mead, although a kind of ale was also brewed. No priest was allowed to enter these hostelries, but this could scarcely have been a great depriva- tion, as the home allowance of mead was a suffi- ciently generous one. Ethelwold’s allowance to each half-dozen of his monks at dinner was a sex- tarium of mead, which, in modern measure, would be probably several gallons. There were three kinds of liquor brewed from THE ISLE OF HONEY 25 honey in Anglo-Saxon times. The commonest, or mead proper, which may be taken as the usual drink of the masses, was made by steeping in water the crushed refuse of the combs after the honey had been pressed from them. This would be strained and set aside in earthen vessels until it fermented and became mead. And the longer it was kept, the more potent grew the liquor. Another kind, made from honey, water, and the juice of mulberries, was called Morat ; and this, presumably, was the beverage of the more well-to-do. A third concoction, known as Pigment, was brewed from the purest honey, flavoured with spices of different sorts, and received an additional lacing of some kind of wine. Probably this was the mead served at the royal table. The office of King’s Cup-bearer could have been no sinecure in those days, for it was the custom of Anglo-Saxon monarchs to entertain their courtiers at four banquets daily, and the quantities of liquor which the old records tell us were consumed on these occasions seem incredible, even in the annals of such a deep-drinking race. Not the least valuable outcome of the Norman Conquest, as far as the national temperance was concerned, must have been the reform instituted in these Court orgies by William the First, who reduced their number to a single state banquet daily. If it may be supposed that the reign of Harold marked the summit of popularity for our good oid 26 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE English honey-brew, it is equally certain that with the coming of the Normans began its slow decline in the national estimation. Following in the trail of Duke William’s nondescript army came the traders, with their outlandish liquors from the grape ; and wine must soon have taken the place of the Saxon mead, first among the foreign nobles, and later among the native thanes. From that day mead has steadily declined in vogue, and to- day mead-making is practically a lost art, surviving only among a few old-fashioned folk here and there in remote country places. But it is still to be obtained; and those of us who have had the good fortune to taste good old mead, well matured in the wood, are sure to feel a regret that no determined effort is being made to rehabilitate it in the national favour. Perhaps there is no more wholesome drink in the world, and certainly none requiring less technical skill in the making. All the ancient books on bee- keeping give receipts for its manufacture, differing only in the variety of foreign ingredients added for its improvement, or, as we prefer to believe, to its degradation. For the finest mead can be brewed from pure honey and water alone, and any addition of spices or other matter serves only to destroy its unique flavour. Some of the sixteenth and seventeenth century bee-masters were re- nowned in their day for their mead-brewing ; and one of the foremost of them claims for his potion THE ISLE OF HONEY 27 that it was absolutely indistinguishable, by the most competent judges, from old Canary Sack. He gives careful directions for the manufacture of his mead ; and these can be, and have, indeed, recently been, followed with complete success. This mead, when kept for a number of years, froths into the glass like champagne, but stills at once, leaving the glass lined with sparkling air-bells. It is of a pale golden colour, and has a bouquet something like old cider; but its flavour is hardly to be com- pared with any known liquor of the present time. It is interesting, however, to have its originator’s authority for its close resemblance to Canary Sack, as this gives a clue to the intrinsic qualities of a wine long since passed out of the popular ken, CHAPTER III BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES TUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee are generally struck with two very remark- able characteristics about them—their invari- able fine old classic and romantic flavour, and their ingenious leavening of a great mass of quite obvious fable by a very small modicum of enduring fact. It is difficult to realise, until one has delved deep into these curious old records, how com- pletely they are dyed through and through with the picturesque, but mainly erroneous, ideas of the ancient classic bee-fathers. The writers were, almost without exception, earnest, practical men, whose chief interest in life was the study and pursuit of their craft. But they seem, one and all, to have laboured under the idea that it was their bounden duty to uphold everything written about bees by the old Greek and Roman 4i¢zeratz, and that it would be the rankest heresy to advance any new truth, garnered from their individual experi- 28 6L91 ‘NOOd-aaa S.NAGsAU sasOW - = SOS . » 6291 “eylng-pjO BYTUL ea " a = “2 aqnae “sa Pjyoog “woyny LeaH 4q } UIP TAFT ato 2S 3.10 ; UV Serena Ut gee Sper J PNT JOR Nie hence eff - sStay nog amp ur suc FY 24IJO NSIS qn xd Lipa pwaagt pas ws Moy spar plo} 3g oa 232 purcoyIMiysq3 303 poaui2g) é oN = SSRN OGdNOT- : Be Lag PAY a poaorddh paotnog my Sone AT Pom a eq “uousg > ssteduss “onprpuing | Sigfrnrgas ryftaou prob 1¢— Se Sf 2 eAgalepy auaypeoxa gour sar r Tex aysu-ne facto uu he ke - “smUCTOD aya ur Jonas se | ©. Ssoary-aseng 01 Surqqax 11943 toadaad onan | © {ee ss0g dooy-seqony ve 01) sucpanqaadotony, > “SaAiq-aesg Jo prayat ‘saxogauy: | “edjuekt uy wg? Suidaay aya moy Suyise _|-@ squaui2aoxdtoy pur samausdg ip ma Ay \ See oe 3g Bourianay, aad aaa SSN: a4} = oy 4 me \ “Jo dunesry, x oe MAAOOSL 1: eros . q eying 3° \ : q ~ e BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 29 ence, unless it could be supported by ample testi- mony from the same infallible source. They seemed to look upon the works of Aris- totle, Virgil, Pliny, and the rest, as so many divine revelations of the mystery of bee-craft, all-sufficing, finitely perfect ; and they continually quoted from them in support of their own contentions, or in refutation of the statements of others, much as teachers of religion refer doubters to Bible texts. The bee-masters of the Middle Ages were, how- ever, not alone in adopting this peculiar attitude of mind. It seems to have been the prevailing habit of the time with all classes. One might almost be justified in concluding that the study of nature in those days had no other object with these inveterate old classicians but to support what had already been set down by their revered oracles. It was enough that a thing had been written in Greek or Latin in the literary youth of the world; it was immaculate—the first and last word on the question; and if their personal observations seemed at variance with any~statement of the old-world writers, then the contradiction was only an apparent one, and could, no doubt, be easily resolved by a more learned exponent of these bee-scriptures of ancient days. It is certainly, at first glance, a matter for wonder that men could pass their whole lives in the pursuit of the craft, and yet manage to preserve uncor- rupted a faith which seems so readily, and at so 30 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE many points, assailable. But it must be remem- bered that any observation of the inner life of the honey-bee was then an extremely difficult thing. It was next to impossible to see anything that was going on inside the hives in use at that day. Pliny mentions a hive made of what he calls mirror-stone, which was probably talc, and through the transparent sides of which the work- ing of the bees could be seen. But nothing of the kind seems to have been attempted among English bee-masters until the seventeenth century. More- over, even if the whole hive had been made of clear glass, the observer would have been very little the wiser. He would have had the outer sides of the two end combs in view, and he would have seen much coming and going among the bees, with an occasional glimpse of the queen. But all the wonderful activity of the hive, so laboriously ascertained by latter-day observers, with the help of so many ingenious appliances, goes on entirely in the hidden recesses of the combs; and any attempt to study this life under the conditions appertaining in the Middle Ages would have been manifestly futile. It was not until Huber’s leaf-hive was invented—when it became to some extent possible to divide the combs for a short time without hopelessly disturb- ing the bees—that any real progress in bee-know- ledge was made. The modern observation-hive, wherein the bees are compelled to build their BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 31 combs between glass partitions, one over the other instead of side by side, was a still greater advance, and rendered the whole interior of the bee-dwelling available for study. But it is open to objection that bee-life in such a contrivance is carried on under too artificial conditions. In a natural bee-nest, the combs are built roughly side by side, and the brood is reared in the centre area of each comb, the surface covered by the breeding- cells diminishing outwards in each direction. Thus the brood-nest takes a globular form, with the honey-stores above and around it; and this natural arrangement is inevitably destroyed in a hive where the combs are superimposed and not collateral. In the face, therefore, of the practical impossi- bility of learning anything about bees when they were housed in the usual straw-skep, the old bee- masters confined themselves to a repetition of the beliefs of the ancient writers, deftly interwoven with speculations of their own, which, as no one was in a position to refute them, were advanced with all the more daring and assurance. They seem to have been, in the main, agreed on the point that the ordinary generative prin- ciple, otherwise universal throughout creation, was miraculously dispensed with in the single case of the honey-bee. Moses Rusden, who was bee- master to King Charles the Second, and who published his ‘Further Discovery of Bees” so 32 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE late as the year 1679, believed that the worker- bees gathered from the flowers not only the germs of life, but the actual corporeal substance, of the young bees. ‘ He pointed triumphantly to the little globular lumps of many-coloured pollen which bees so industriously fetch into the hives during the breeding-season, and asserted that these were the actual bodily matter from which the young bees developed. He also maintained that every hive was ruled over by a king, but here Rusden was evidently trying to serve two masters. No doubt he was a true “ Abhorrer,” and heartily detested anything at variance with the doctrine of the divine right of monarchs. He had faithfully copied from Virgil as to the gathering of this generative substance from the flowers; but he felt that, as the King’s Bee-Master, it was incumbent on him to put in a good word for the restored monarchy if he could. There were still many in the realm who were altogether opposed to the Restoration, and probably more who were waverers between the faiths. And Rusden, doubtless, saw that if he could point to any parallel instance in Nature where the system of monarchy was the divinely ordained state, he would be furnishing his patron with a magnificent argument in favour of his king- ship, and one, moreover, which would especially appeal to the ignorant and superstitious masses. No doubt, however, in taking up this position, BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 33 Rusden was only echoing the belief immemorially established among the beemen of the past. The single large bee, which all knew to exist in each hive, was generally looked upon as the abso- lute ruler of the community. It is variously described as a king or queen by writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, but only in the sense of a governor; and the word chosen largely depended on the sex of the august person who happened to occupy the English throne at the time. Thus Rusden very wisely discarded the notion of a queen-bee when he had to deal with Charles the Second. Butler, perhaps the most learned of the medizval writers on the honey-bee, as astutely forbore to mention the word king, his book being published in the reign of Queen Anne. He calls it ‘‘ The Feminine Monarchie,” but seems to have no more suspected the truth that the large bee was really the mother of the whole colony than any of his predecessors. Almost alone in his day, however, he refuses to accept the flower theory of bee-generation, and asserts that the worker-bees and drones are the females and males respectively. But, he says, they ‘‘engender not as other living creatures; onely they suffer their Drones among them for a season, by whose Mascu- line virtue they strangely conceive and breed for the preservation of their sweet kinde.” He gets over the difficulty of there being no drones in the hive for nine months in the year, during part of which 3 34. THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE time breeding goes actively forward, by asserting that the worker-bees immaculately conceive of the drones for the season, their summer impregnation sufficing until the drones reappear in the May of the following year. Thus, without guessing it, he was very near the discovery of one of the most astounding facts in Nature—that the queen-bee of a hive, after a single traffic with a drone, continues to produce fertile eggs for the rest of her life, which may extend to as long as three, or even four, years. Butler’s book is rich in the quaint bee-lore of his times. He tells us the queen-bee has under her “subordinate Gouvernours and Leaders. For difference from the rest they beare for their crest a tuft or tossel, in some coloured yellow, in some murrey, in manner of a plume; whereof some turne downward like an Ostrich-feather, others stand upright like a Hern-top. In less than a quarter of an hour,” he assures us, ‘‘ you may see three or foure of them come forth of a good stall ; but chiefly in Gemini, before their continuall labour have worne these ornaments.” And any warm spring or summer morning, if you watch a hive of bees at work, you may chance upon much the same thing. In some flowers, notably the evening primrose, the pollen-grains have a way of clinging together in threads; and these festoons often catch in the antenne of the foraging bees, giving much the same appearance of a plume, or tassel, as Butler saw in his day. “OoTOA pyrpeitions Yonge My sotpey Yate sm, Sgo1099 Jo 3920N Ul azeoq] J caqUTEA aI VHeY “OATEHY *Buope yoru Poa Apueqes pedossrany sty, Zuo2y spuejnoyaswos ‘Adjo Aatp awn ay uaqea Suaip puy ¢ aya (nop pua [fry Aor vay []njousnoUy spy { ayeg sarz0my Summ 94951 PWIA OL, Sayre 01 Ajdar Qadjy aunay wp ayryyonoA, 92645 Ajanta syst squs29" anesd 304M OL, fore saqury Up apg saruzd 19g] -O YMAA ‘aikez erhqa +O ple syeaa 09 21103) aanjeoyd UT spood 108-sured ajay L “yey your pure 29q0; your SSE eae SH EEE : ase =SEsS= ist =4=43- a ad -o-ry -uy tye kor ange Jo yoqg Aattatd yaraa apodar yy ye938 9q1 q1eSo] opdood srya spnemmos ano Sade Figrety ADL ppd O3 RULED gaze A YAIQIw aI jo r2AAOd ON (pay ur aeaIg0}) —x2y 1axFDAM Fata Spt tag anq pus utes nog nq «Dvywt 10 “ayed dem ary snoqsns soy ‘T22] -EZIq ou cmos -txrH Wy SLICIG INT YOYAA ‘Viqaono oury aazydg aryues sryi uo wegL YI. 942 5]29x9 suezeMY snowy yay Liaivy m3q1 surewereas 07 ayor yor 6 nOgry IJIq_p :2TeDAA UOMIMIOD ay) I0g UOTDMTD ut F1OAA 9,7, JO “IU Tur -ay WiyIsarqouruoyy TE JO OS — “yoq SL apqraRaOW IYI SeAryTTeJO $s V = : SS ee Seige (Stat SL asst gp I. oes o. MEBANE. Bd: So ee eee F F A S of all fatesthe Monarchicis bef, So of all Monarchics thae Fe. mi- nine, Of ‘They vvork in common for the common vyeale. Their labour’s rePleffe to maintains their Mate: Their rE: Be i: —-}-~~1-0- 4 2 é = Nay EP rh = Servs ise fa eat = 13 oF = hf: Seesnes = Se —F=}-F y= farcous Amazons excels the 1¢&, That on thisearthie Sphere haue euer bing VVhofe lit- tle hearts in Hex. genia no Be za- leell, for cuzious Artmay pafle, er imitate, Onc Sou'raign and but weaker fex ( fo great in field: Nopowvers of the mightre(t Males canmake to yeeld: They living ayes ene commands this people loyall,the great Marpefe with plenty bleft of iffue roy all; An- ti- o- pe. SSeS | S=tpS SESS ———— moft fober and moftchaf, Their pai goods in pleafure fcotne to vvaft, and Ori. thyja faire; VVith o- therPrinces hir In. fantaes are. When fo increafedis this prudent Nation, That their owne limits cannot them fiffice ; Fo fecke new Cities, fur new habitation, They fend abroad their num’rous Culonies : -Autiope the prime Prince gone, Orisbya foone Ofhir Queene-mother, making mone, Begs the like boone: ‘That with hir eraine hir fortune the may feeke: And this fhe fings in meafures mournboll fweere. c A PAGE FROM BUTLER’S ‘‘BEES MADRIGALL.” 1623 BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 35 He gives some advice as to the deportment of a good bee-master which is well worth quoting. “Tf thou wilt have the favour of thy Bees that they sting thee not, thou must avoid such things as offend them: thou must not be unchaste or un- cleanely: for impurity and sluttishnesse (them- selves being most chaste and neat) they utterly abhore : thou must not come among them smelling of sweat, or having a stinking breath, caused either through eating of Leekes, Onions, Garleeke, and the like; or by any other meanes: the noi- somenesse whereof is corrected with a cup of Beere: and therefore it is not good to come among them before you have drunke: thou must not be given to surfeiting and drunkennesse : thou must not come puffing and blowing unto them, neither hastily stir among them, nor violently defend thy selfe when they seeme to threaten thee; but softly moving thy hand before thy face, gently putting them by: and lastly, thou must be no Stranger unto them. Ina word, thou must be chaste, cleanly, sweet, sober, quiet, and familiar : so will they love thee, and know thee from all other.” Thus, the good bee-master, according to Butler, is necessarily a compendium of all the virtues ; and nothing more seems to be wanted to bring about the millennium than to induce all mankind to become keepers of bees. Writers on the honey-bee in medizval times vied with each other in their testimony to the 3-2 36 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE extraordinary powers and intelligence of their hive-people. But perhaps a story, gravely related by Butler, outdoes them all. He prefaces it by declaring that ‘‘ Bees are so wise and skilful, as not onely to discrie a certaine little God amightie, though he came among them in the likenesse of a Wafer-cake; but also to build him an artificial chappell.” He goes on to relate that ‘‘a certaine simple woman, having some stals of Bees that yeelded not unto hir hir desired profit, but did consume and die of the murraine; made hir mone to an other Woman more simple than hir selfe ; who gave her counsell to get a consecrated Host, and put it among them. According to whose advice she went to the priest to receive the host : which when she had done, she kept it in hir mouth, and being come home againe she took it out, and put it into one of hir hives. Whereupon the murraine ceased, and the Honie abounded. The Woman, therefore, lifting up the Hive at the due time to take out the Honie, saw there (most strange to be seene) a Chappell built by the Bees, with an altar in it, the wals adorned by marvellous skill of Architecture, with windowes conveniently set in their places: also a doore and a steeple with bells. And the Host being laid upon the altar, the Bees making a sweet noise, flew around it.” This story is only paralleled by another, equally ancient, wherein it is related that some thieves BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 37 broke into a church, and stole the silver casket in which the holy wafers were kept. They found one wafer in the box, and this they hid under a hive before making off with the more intrinsically valuable part of their booty. In the night, it seems, the owner of the hive was awakened by the most ravishing strains of music, coming at set intervals from the direction of his bee-garden. He went out with a lantern to ascertain the cause of it, and discovered it to proceed from the interior of one of his hives. Full of perturbation at this miracle, he went and roused the Bishop, and acquainted him with the extraordinary state of affairs ; and the Bishop coming with his retinue and lifting up the hive, they found that the bees had taken possession of the consecrated wafer, and placed it in the upper part of their hive, having first made for it a box of the whitest wax, an exact replica of the onestolen. And all around this box there were choirs of bees singing, and keeping watch over it, as monks do in their chapel. “ With which story,” adds the narrator prophetically, “I doubt not but some incredulous people will quarrell.” In their directions for hiving a swarm, the medizval bee-masters were always quaintly ex- plicit. The dressing of the skep which was to receive the swarm was a particularly elaborate process. When the skep was new, you were recommended to scour it out with a handful of 38 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE sweet herbs, such as thyme, marjoram, or hyssop ; and this was to be followed by a second dressing of honey and water, or milk and salt. But the preparation of an old skep must have been a rather disgusting affair. You were to put “two or three handfuls of mault, or pease, or other corne in the hive, and let a Hogge eat thereof. Meanwhile, doe you so turne the Hive, that the fome or froth, which the Hogge maketh in eating, may goe all about the Hive. And then wipe the Hive lightlie with a linnen cloth, and so will the Bees like this Hive better than the new.” When the swarm was up, and “ busie in their dance,” you were to “ play them a fit of mirth on a Bason, Warming-pan, or Kettle, to make them more speedily light.” We are assured that the swarm would fly faster, or slower, according to the noise made. If the fit of mirth were in rapid measure, the bees would fly fast and high; but with a soft leisurely music, they would go slowly, and soon descend, This curious custom of “ring- ing the bees” is undoubtedly of Roman origin ; but whether it was introduced by Czsar’s followers, or those of Claudius in the first century, or whether the old English bee-masters themselves derived it from their classic reading, is hard to determine. It is still to be heard in many country districts, and its exponents seem to retain all the faith of their forefathers in its efficacy. Probably, in medizval times, when bee-gardens were much BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 39 more plentiful than they are now, the custom had at least one undeniable merit: it proclaimed to the various hive-owners in the vicinity that a swarm was in the air, and that its rightful owner was on the alert. In this way, no doubt, dis- honest claims to its possession were largely pre- vented, or, at least, discouraged. The question whether the noise made by ring- ing has any real effect on the swarming bees is still not absolutely decided. With the exception of the old skeppists, not a few of whom still exist in out-of-the-way rural corners, modern apicultu- rists have long discarded the custom as a gross superstition. But it has recently been suggested that the din made by old-fashioned bee-keepers when a swarm is up may have a real use after all. It is conjectured that the cloud of bees—which at first is nothing but a chaos of flashing wings, the whole contingent darting and whirling about in- discriminately over a large area together—is really dispersing in search of the queen. The suggestion put forward is that they follow her by ear, as she is supposed to utter a peculiar piping sound when flying. The din of the key and pan may, it is said, prevent the bees hearing this note and following her in her first erratic convolutions, and thus the swarm is more likely to pitch on a station near home. The theory is interesting, but hardly tenable. Old popular observances of this kind are seldom based on even the vaguest thread 40 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE of fact, and it is much more probable that no effect whatever is produced on the bees by the ringing. With regard to the right of a bee-keeper to follow his swarm into a neighbour's land, it is interesting to have the assurance of one of these ancient writers that “if they will not be stayed, but, hasting on still, goe beyond your bounds ; the ancient Law of Christendome permitteth you to pursue them whithersoever, for the recovery of your owne.” But, the writer adds, if your swarm goes so fast and so far that you lose sight and hearing of them, you also lose all right and property in them. In this case you have no legal alternative but to leave the bees to whom- soever may first find them. In view of recent disputes on this matter, wherein the law laid down appears to have been both vague and arbitrary, it is useful to be able to point to so ancient an authority in vindication of the bee- keeper’s rights. There is hardly any detail in bee-government which had not its curious observance or super- stition in medieval times. One and all seemed to believe in the old Virgilian notion that bees carried about little stones to balance their flight during windy weather, and some even thought that flowers were carried about in the same way. Red-coloured clothing was supposed to be par- ticularly offensive to bees, and one is warned not \ ‘al STATA AA ATA iii l AAA Cam =” AT CCN hi REV. JOHN THORLEY WRITING HIS ““MELISSOLOGIA Hg WITH THE HELP OF HIS BEES. 1744 (From an old Bee Book) BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 41 to venture near the apiary thus attired. In the hives the old bees and the young were believed to occupy separate quarters. In regard to this, it is a well-attested fact that, during the height of the honey season, the bees found in the upper stories of a hive are principally young ones who have not yet flown. We are told that if any of the bees have not returned to the hive at the end of the day, the queen goes out to find them and show them the way back. No one need be in any fear of over- looking the ruler of the hive, because she can be known by her “lofty pace and countenance expressing Majesty, and she hath a white spot in her forehead glistering like a Diadem.” An old writer advises that all the hives should have holes bored right through them to prevent spider-webs. He was also of opinion that the bees swarmed because of the queen’s tyranny, and if she followed them, they put her to death. He informs us that the drones were honey-bees which had lost their stings and grown fat. This was a very old idea, with which the sceptical Butler dealt in the following fashion: “The general opinion anent the Drone is that he is made of a honey-bee, that hath lost hir sting ; which is even as likelie as that a dwarfe, having his guts pulled out, should become a gyant.” But the bee-masters of the Middle Ages were ever intolerant of other people’s mistaken ideas, while supporting with the gravest 42 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE argument and show of learning equally benighted superstitions of their own. A little book published in 1656, and called “The Country Housewife’s Garden,” is interesting, as it was probably written for cottagers by one almost in the same humble walk of life, whereas the bee-books generally of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries were, for the most part, the work of men of considerably higher station. This book, almost alone of its kind, harbours no fine theories on bee-keeping, but keeps throughout to rule-of-thumb methods. The writer, evidently caring little for speculation as to the origin of bees, but confining his remarks to practical honey- getting, takes up the following wholesome position: “Much discanting there is of, and about the Master Bees, and of their degrees, order, and Government : but the truth in this point is rather imagined, than demonstrated. There are some conjectures of it, viz., wee see in the combs diverse greater houses than the rest, and we commonly hear the night before they cast, sometimes one Bee, sometimes two or more Bees, give a lowde and severall sound from the rest, and sometimes Bees of greater bodies than the common sort: but what of all this? I leane not on conjectures, but love to set down that I know to be true, and leave these things to them that love to divine.” The “greater houses” here mentioned were, no doubt, the large cells in which the queens are bred. é f ¢ BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 43 Just before swarming-time, as many as nine.or ten of these are sometimes to be found in one hive. The same writer has the inevitable ill word against the drones. These, he says, “are, by all probability and judgement, an idle kind of bees, and wastefull, which have lost their stings, and so being as it were gelded, become idle and great. They hate the bees, and cause them cast the sooner.” Never did creature come by so bad a name, and so undeservedly, as the luckless drone with these old scribes. Another of them speaks of the drone as ‘“‘a grosse Hive-Bee without sting, which hath beene alwaies reputed a greedy lozell (and there- fore hee that is quicke at meat and slow at worke is fitted with this title): for howsoever he brave it with his round velvet cap, his side gowne, his full paunch, and his lowd voice; yet he is but an idle companion, living by the sweat of others’ brows. For he worketh not at all, either at home or abroad, and yet spendeth as much as two labourers: you shall never finde his maw without a good drop of the purest nectar. In the heat of the day he flieth abroad, aloft, and about, and that with no small noise, as though he would doe some great act: but it is onely for his pleasure, and to get him a stomach, and then returns he presently to his cheere.” But it is among the writings of the old bee- men with a taste for the quack-doctor’s art that 44 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE some of the quaintest notions are to be found. We are told that honey, well rubbed into the scalp night and morning, is a sovereign remedy for baldness, and if it was mixed with a few dead bees and a little old comb well pounded, it was still more efficacious. Dead bees, dried and re- duced to a powder, form a principal ingredient in all sorts of nostrums of the time. This powder, mixed with water and drunk every morning, is recommended as an unfailing cleanser to the system. And if the heads of a large number of bees are collected, burned, and the ashes com- pounded with a little honey, it makes an excellent salve for all sorts of eye disorders. There was a famous preparation called Oxymel, which was in great vogue in medizval times. It seems to have been nothing more than a mixture of honey, water, and vinegar; but it was accre- dited with extraordinary virtues. It was an in- fallible cure for sciatica, gout, and kindred ail- ments; and one writer also tells us that it was ‘‘good to gargarize with in a Squinancy.” But honey and dead bees were not the only products of the hives which were pressed into medical service. Wax also was believed to have exceptional curative powers in all sorts of human ills. It had the faculty of curing ulcers, and “ if the quantity of a Pease in Wax be swallowed down of Nurces, it doth dissolve the Milke curdled in the paps.” It was also used as an embrocation BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 45 for stiff joints and aching muscles. The supposed curative value of beeswax in its natural state, however, was as nothing compared to its capa- bilities when distilled. This preparation, known as Oil of Wax, and famous at the time all the world over, seems to have come nearer the ideal of a panacea—a cure-all—than anything else before or since. The making of Oil of Wax seems to have been a very complicated affair. First the wax had to be melted, poured into sweet wine, and wrung out in the hands. This was done seven times, using fresh wine at each operation. Then the wax was placed in a retort with a quantity of red-brick powder, and carefully distilled. A yellow oil came over into the receiver, and this was dis- tilled a second time, when the “ Coelestiall or Divine medicine” was ready. Miraculous portents seem to have accompanied its preparation, for we are told that ‘‘in the coming forth of this Oile there appeareth in the Receiver the foure Elements, the Fire, the Aire, the Water, and the Earth, right marvellous to see.” The power to stop immediately the falling out of the hair, heal the most serious wounds in a few days, and cure toothache and pains in the back, can be reckoned only among its minor virtues. Much greater properties were claimed for Oil of Wax, for it not only “killeth worms and cureth palsy and distempered spleens, but it bringeth forth the dead or living child.” 46 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE One last extract must be given from the same old writer. It relates to the generation of bees, and brings us out, perhaps, on the highest pin- nacle of the marvellous. Aftera learned disserta- tion on the method of breeding bees from a dead ox—assuring us, however, that if we can procure a dead lion for the purpose, it will be much better, as then the bees will have a lion-like courage— the writer goes on to explain how bees may be produced in another way. We are to save all dead bees, burn them, sprinkle the ashes with wine, and then leave them exposed to the sun in a warm place. In a little while, we are told, all the bees so treated will come to life again, and we shall then have a new stock ready for hiving. Dipping into these time-worn records of the Middle Ages, with their embrowned, scarce legible type and their antiquated phraseology, one comes at last to realise how very little the old bee-masters actually understood of the true ways of the honey- bee, or, indeed, of any real essential in bee-craft. And yet the production of honey and wax must have been an industry very largely developed in those days. Somehow or other, in spite of archaic theories and useless interference in the work of their hives, these people must have contrived to supply a market of whose magnitude we can now- adays form little conception. The trade in wax alone must have been a very large one, for, except in the poorest tenements, this formed the only BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 47 available source of artificial light. And honey was in much more universal demand than it is now, because cane-sugar could hardly have developed into a serious rival as a sweetening agent among the masses at a time when it stood, perhaps, at two shillings a pound. But in speculations of this kind, it must be borne in mind that, although the men who wrote about bees displayed so picturesque an ignorance in all matters appertaining to their charges, these formed a very small minority among the bee- keepers as a whole. Probably the bulk of the supply in honey and wax came from bee-gardens, whose owners neither knew nor cared anything about books, and were concerned only in the practical side of the work, where their knowledge, hereditary for the most part, amply sufficed for the part they played in it. Moreover, it is only in latter-day, scientific apiculture that the work of the bee-master counts to any greatextent. Nowadays, under the light of twentieth-century knowledge, this is competent to bring about the doubling, and even trebling, of the honey-harvest possible under the ancient methods. But the old skeppists did, and could do, little more than look on at the work of their bees, and here and there put a scarce availing hand to it. Nearly all the credit for the results achieved in those days must be given to the bees themselves, who, untold ages before, had brought to finite perfection 48 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE their remarkable systems and policies. In all likelihood the bee-masters, the practical men who owned the hives, had much the same shrewd faculty of leaving things alone in far-off times as we observe among the skeppists of the last genera- tion. In many ways, what they did at last come to do they did ill, notably in the apparently insane practice of destroying the bees to obtain the honey. But even this was not so foolish a procedure as it appears to-day. It was a plain matter of business, according to the lights of the time. Their process was to condemn to the sulphur- pit all the lightest and the heaviest of their stocks. Experience taught them that the weak colonies stood little chance of getting through the winter unless they were artificially fed; while if the bees of the large colonies were preserved, after being robbed of their stores, they would need the same provision. It wasamatterofarithmetic. Artificial feeding was then a much more costly affair than it is to-day, and the reckoning came out well on the side of slaughter. The worst part of the business, so far as modern scientific bee-breeders are concerned, is that the old system of destruc- tion tended to preserve only those strains of bees who were inveterate swarmers; while the steady, industrious stay-at-homes, who accumu- lated the largest stores of honey, were invari- ably exterminated. This is a fateful legacy to have passed on, when we consider that one of BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 49 the chief aims of modern bee-science is to abolish swarming altogether. The swarming habit is one of the greatest obstacles in the way of a large honey yield, and until a race of non-swarming bees has been evolved by modern breeders there will always be this element of uncertainty in the honey harvest. Latter-day beemen, therefore, join the chorus of disapproval of this old, senseless custom of bee- burning, rather because it has given them the task of undoing the work of ages before any progress is possible, than from the generally accepted humanitarian reasons. CHAPTER IV AT THE CITY GATES N a village in Southern Sussex, close under the green brink of the Downs, there live two bee- keepers who represent, in their widely diver- gent methods and outlook, the extremes of bee- manship as still extant in modern times. The one dwells in a little ancient thatched cottage, set in the heart of an old-fashioned English garden, where dome-shaped hives of straw are dotted about at random amidst a wild growth of the old-fashioned English flowers. The other has built himself a trim villa on a hillside, topped with a sheltering crest of pine-wood; and here he has established a great modern honey-farm, replete with every device and system of management known to apiarian scientists throughout the two worlds. One might suppose, on leaving the village street on a fine May morning and coming upon these two settlements in the open country beyond, that all the romance and old-world flavour of bee-keeping were inevitably to be found in the 50 awn oy : Mey Ss ANGEMENT OF COMB: NATURAL ARR INVERTED STRAW SKEP-HIVE, SHOWING AT THE CITY GATES ‘ 51 ancient bee-garden, where the droning music of the hives seems to originate in the thicket of blossoming lilac, and red-may, and veronica, the hives themselves being the last things one noticed in such a tangle of bright-hued flowers. To ex- pect sentiment in the other quarter—a great cindered tract of country, with its long parallel rows of modern hives, all painted in various colours, its dwelling-house that might have been trans- planted bodily from a well-to-do London suburb, and its line of outbuildings, with their bustle of business, and coughing oil-engine, and reverbera- tion of hammer and saw—was to expect something evidently out-of-date andimpossible. As well look for art in a Ghetto as to seek reverence for ancient bee-customs in a twentieth-century trading con- cern such as this, established to supply the market for honey just as a Manchester ‘factory turns out calico and corduroy. Many lovers of country life, peripatetic artists and chance pedestrians for the most part, came to the village with this notion firmly impressed upon them, and, visiting the old bee-garden and finding the old beautiful things there in abundance, went no farther, and became no wiser. They wandered round the crooked, red-tiled paths of the garden with its ancient proprietor ; stooped under bowers of living gold and purple ; waded through seas of scarlet poppy and blue forget-me-not and tawny mignonette ; came upon old beehives in all sorts 4—2 52 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE of shady, unpremeditated corners; and steeped themselves in medizvalism up to the eyes. The very song of the bees seemed to belong entirely to past days. None, surely, but a hopeless Vandal could put a colony of bees in one of the ugly square hives, and expect them to-go honey-seeking in the old harmonious, happy way, sanctified of the ages. And so they never ventured up the hill to the great bee-farm, but kept to the garden below, and listened by the hour together to the quaint talk of its white-headed, smock-frocked owner, or stood valiantly at the foot of the ladder when he climbed up to dislodge a swarm from the moss-grown apple-boughs, or helped him to scour the new straw skeps with handfuls of mint and lavender, or beat out weird, unskilful music with the door-key on the old brass-pan when a swarm was high in the air. Much could be learnt, it is true, from quiet days spent in the old bee-garden, especially in May, before the earliest swarms were ready to forsake the hives. The first faculty to be acquired was that of wandering among the bees, or standing between their straw houses, undismayed at their incessant and often terrifying approaches, Whatever con- fidence one may place in bee-keepers’ assertions that their bees never sting, it is a bold man who can preserve entire equanimity when bees are settling continuously on his hands, his face, his AT THE CITY GATES 53 clothing, and a whole flying squadron of them are shrilling vindictively about his ears. Nothing will come of it, he knows, if only he can keep still, But the tendency to turn and flee, or at least to beat off these minatory atoms with wildly waving arms, is all but irresistible for the novice. It is only their way, he is assured, of expressing _or of satisfying their curiosity; and, this being done, they fly off harmlessly enough to give a good report of him to the ruling powers within the hive. But he knows that this report is sometimes anything but good. At least, there are a few luckless individuals in the world who dare not venture within a dozen yards of a bee- hive without being set upon unmercifully, and chased by an angry squad of these tart virgins for the space of a quarter-mile. Moreover, in certain states of the weather—when thunder is about, and the air is tense and still—bees will often sheath their barbed daggers in any human skin, even that of their owner, who has gone among them daily all the season unmolested. There is, therefore, a fateful element of chance in all near watching of beehives, a sensation of being under fire—fine discipline enough, but, for the timorous, hardly to be reckoned among the easy joys of existence. These first deterrents, however, being happily overcome, the watcher is sure to be caught up, sooner or later, in the sheer fascination of the 54 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE thing, and to find himself recklessly, almost breathlessly, looking on at what is nothing else than a great informing pageant of life. He stands, as it were, a stranger at the gates of a city, inhabited by the most interesting, and in some respects the most advanced, people in the world. Of the inner life of the city, apart from the deep busy murmur that surges out to him, he learns nothing, and will learn nothing until he puts sentimental pride in his pocket, and makes pilgrimage to the great bee-farm on the hill, But here, in the meanwhile, is food enough to satisfy the keenest appetite for the marvellous. In and out through the yawning entrance-gate of the city, under the hot May sunshine, there are thousands of busy people coming and going. The broad threshold of the hive is completely hidden under opposing streams, the one setting out towards the fragrant fields and hedgerows, the other tumbling and seething in, almost every bee dragging after her some kind of mysterious treasure. e The outgoing bees start on their journey in two different fashions. Some emerge from the hive and rise at once on the wing, lancing straight off into the sunshine; and these are foragers, who have already made several journeys afield since the sun broke, hot and rosy, over the eastward hill. But others, essaying their first excursion for the day, creep out of the murmurous darkness AT THE CITY GATES 55 of the hive, and come with a little impetuous rush to the edge of the alighting-board. Here they pause a moment to flutter their wings and rub their great eyes free of the hive-twilight. And then they lift into the air, hover an instant with their heads towards their dwelling, taking careful stock of it, sweep up into the blue, and volley away with the rest towards the distant hill-side, white with its bridal wreath of clover- bloom. The homing bees move much more sedately.. They come sailing in like bronze argosies laden to the water's edge. Those bearing full sacs of clover-juice for the honey-making seldom carry an outside load of pollen as well. They have all to do in bringing their distended bodies to a safe anchorage on the entrance-board, and charge headlong into the hive, possessed of only one idea—to hand their garnered sweets over to the ‘first house-bee they chance upon, and then to hurry out in search of another load. The pollen- bearers are impelled by the same white-hot energy; but their cargoes are infinitely more cumbersome, and demand a more leisurely pace. Some with panniers, heaped up with a deep orange-coloured material, must rest awhile on the threshold before gathering energy enough to drag their glowing burdens through the city gate. Others just fail to make the harbour, and. sink down on to the grass below, to wait for the same 56 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE freshet of strength that is finally to bring them into the security of the populous haven. Scores of them do not try for harbour at} first tack, but, coming safely into the calm waters of the garden, rest awhile on the nearest leaf or blossom, panting and tremulous, until they are able to wear sail for the last reach home. There is infinite diversity in the loads of these pollen-carrying bees. Hardly a colour, or shade of colour, in the rainbow fails to pass during every moment across the thronging way. Every bee carries a half-globe of this substance, beautifully rounded and shaped, on each of her two hind-legs. It is possible, by marking the colour of her burden, to tell with certainty what flower she has been plundering on each of her trips. This bright orange, which makes always the largest and heaviest bales in the stream of merchandise, is from the dandelions. From the gorse-flowers come loads of deep rich brown almost as weighty. The charlock, that mingles its useless, wanton beauty with every farm-crop, yields the bee interminable gold. White clover, red clover, sainfoin, all load up the little hive coolies with different shades of russet. From the apple- orchards come bursting panniers of pale yellow; the blackberry-blossom yields pollen of a delicate greenish-white. When summer comes, and the poppies make scarlet undertones amidst the wheat and barley, these winged merchant-women stream AT THE CITY GATES 57 homeward with their pollen-baskets laden with funereal black. But, if you watch a hive at work on any bright spring or summer morning, you will see single bees occasionally pass with loads whose source has never yet been fathomed. The lean, glistening, rufous stuff that is continually borne through the hustling crowd is resin gathered from poplar or pine, and used to glue the straw hive down to its base-board, or to stop up draughty crevices and use- less corners, or, diluted into varnish, to paint the honeycombs with an acid-proof, preservative film. But now and then comes a bee with a load whose colour shines up like a danger-signal in darkness. Brilliant scarlet, or soft rose-crimson, or pale lavender, or gleaming white—who shall say in what far, forgotten nook of the country-side she has been adventuring, or what rare blossom she has chanced upon in the wilderness, and, despoil- ing it of its maiden treasure greedily, has quickened into duplication the beauty that was its reason for life? Yet the greatest wonder about all this pollen- gathering is that each separate load has been taken entirely from one species of flower. The little half-spheres are packed into the pollen-cells indiscriminately, orange on brown, pale yellow mingled with green, or buff, or grey. But each pair of panniers, representing a single journey, contains the pollén-dust of one kind of blossom 58 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE alone. Going out into an English lane or meadow to watch the bees at work, the first conviction borne in upon an observer is that the bees are darting about from flower to flower without other thought than to load up from any and every capable blossom that stands in their way. But closer scrutiny reveals a curious plan and order in this, as in everything else that the honey-bee undertakes. Tracing an individual bee in her progress along the flowery verge of the lane, you will soon see that she visits only one species of blossom. If she starts on hawthorn, it will be hawthorn all the way. If her load of willowherb- nectar or pollen is not yet a full one, she will overpass a score of tansy-knots or waving jungles of meadow-sweet, just as inviting and resourceful, apparently, to reach the one scanty patch of purple at the end of the lane, Why she should be at such pains to keep the pollen separate as she gathers it, only to get it in- extricably mingled with every other kind in the storehouse at home, is a problem that none but a bee can solve. But all the honey-bee’s reasons and motives in life are made up of a curious blend of cold-drawn sense and sentiment ; and it may be inferred that need and fancy have an equal influ- ence in guiding her in this, as in everything else she does, from her cradle-cell to her grave. Not altogether without seriousness, it may be hazarded that quite as probable a reason for her way of AT THE CITY GATES 59 pollen-gathering is that she deems a certain shade of colour makes a more becoming flying-robe, as that she keeps each load of pollen pure, un- blended, because of some imperious, economic need of the hive. The factor of sex, in all obser- vation of the ways of the honey-bee, is no more to be considered a negligible one than it is in the critical contemplation of the human species of hive. All this incessant coming and going of the busy foragers is alluring enough to the looker-on, but there is evidence of many other activities equally interesting. The work of collecting nectar and pollen is obviously only a part of the duties of this self-immolated spinster-race. Here and there in the seething, hurrying crowd there are bees who do not move with the rest, but, anchored securely in the full force of the living current, with heads lowered and turned towards the hive, are engaged in fanning their wings, and this so swiftly that nothing of the wing but a little grey mist can be seen. Looking more carefully, you will make out that these bees are arranged in nearly regular rows, one behind the other, in open order, so that the conflicting tides of foragers can pass uninter- ruptedly between. If the watcher is bold enough to bring his ear down to the level of the hive, he will make out a steady hissing noise that rings clear above all the din and turmoil made by the incessant travellers to and fro. These rows of fanners are seen to stretch from the hive-door 60 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE right to the edge of the footplate, but principally on one side; and still closer observation will reveal the fact that there is a regular system of relief among them. Though the general volume of sound never abates one jot, every few minutes one or another of these stationary bees moves away, her place being immediately taken by another, who settles down to the common task in line with the rest. The reason forall this is plain enough: the fanners are ‘engaged in ventilating the hive, drawing a current of vitiated air through the entrance on one side, which flanks, but does not oppose, a corresponding current of pure air sucked in on the other. All through the warm days of spring and summer this fanning squadron is constantly at work ; nor does it cease with the darkness. Chill nights find the ranks weakened and reduced to perhaps only a few bees, or even to none at all when a cold snap of weather intervenes. But in the dog-days, or, as the ancients used to say, when Sirius, the honey-star, is shining, the deep sibilant note of these fanners rises, in a populous apiary, almost to the voice-strength of a gale of wind. To come out then under the stars of a summer night, and stand listening in the tense, fragrant darkness to this mighty note, is to get an impression of bee- life unattainable at any other season. In the day- time the sound is intermingled, overwhelmed, by the chorus of the flying bees. But now all are BEE-HOUSE SUSSEX AN OLD _ AT THE CITY GATES 61 safely at home. Each hive is packed from floor to roof with tens of thousands of breathing, heat- producing creatures: the necessity for ventilation is quadrupled, and, far and wide in the bee- . garden, the fanning armies are setting to their work with a will. The. freshman at this fascinating branch of nature-study, brought out into the quiet night to hear such gargantuan music, is always strangely affected by it, some natures incredibly so. In all the great placid void of darkened hill and dale around him, in the whole blue arch overhead, alive with the flinching silver of the stars, there is no sound but a chance trill of a nightingale, the bark of a shepherd’s dog on the distant upland, or, now and then, the droning song of a beetle passing invisibly by. All the world seems at rest, save these mysterious people in the hives; and with them the sound of labour is only redoubled. Bending down to the nearest hive in the darkness, the note comes up to one like the angry roar of the sea. A light brought cautiously to bear upon it, discloses the alighting-board covered with rows of bees, working, as it were, for their lives ; while other bees continually wander in and out of the entrance—the sentries that guard it night and day, just as soldiers guarded the gates of human cities in olden times. The novice at bee-craft, even the most staid and matter-of-fact, is invariably plunged into marvelling silence at the sight. But 62 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE if the night be exceptionally hot and oppressive, and the fanning army unusually large, the bee- master with an eye for dramatic effect generally finishes the tiro’s wonderment by showing him an old trick. He lowers the candle until the flame is just behind the squadron of ventilating bees, and at once all is darkness: the current of air drawn out of the hive has proved strong enough to extinguish the light. It has been said that there are guard-bees who watch the hive-door day and night. To the un- skilled human eye one bee looks very like another, and it is difficult to understand how, in the many thousands that pass, the guards manage to detect an intruder so unerringly, and to eject her with such unceremonious promptitude as is always shown. Probably it is not by sight alone that these occasional interlopers are singled out. The sense of smell in the honey-bee is extraordinarily acute, and this, no doubt, assists the guards in their difficult work. It is well known that a queen- bee must possess a very distinct odour, as her mere presence abroad, even when shut up in a box, will attract the drones from all quarters. In all likelihood the peculiar aroma from each queen-bee impregnates the whole colony, and thus the guard- bees are able at once to distinguish their own kin from that of alien stocks. Still watching the outside life of the hive in the old bee-garden, many other interesting things AT THE CITY GATES 63 come to light. In such an establishment, even if it be only an old-fashioned straw skep, perhaps more than twenty thousand individuals are located; and obviously some regular system of cleaning and scavenging is indispensable. This work can be seen now, going on uninterruptedly in the midst of all the other busy enterprises. Every moment bees come labouring out, bearing particles of refuse, which they throw over the edge of the foot-board, and at once shoulder their way back for another load. Other bees appear, carrying the bodies of comrades who have died in the hive; and every now and then one comes struggling through the crowd, bearing high above her a strange and ghastly thing, perfect replica of herself, but white throughout, save for its black beady eyes. This is the unborn bee, dead in its cradle-cell. Infant mortality is an evil not yet overcome even by the doughty honey-bee, and many are carried out thus, especially in early spring. Watching these undertakers of the hive in their gruesome but necessary work, a singular fact can be noted. While all other debris is merely cast over the brink of the entrance-board, where it accumulates day by day on the grass below, these dead larvee are never disposed of thus. They are carried right away, their bearers taking wing and flying straight off over the hedgerow, to drop them at harmless distance from the neighbourhood of the hive. There is still another kind of work going briskly 64 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE forward round the gates of the bee-city. Certain among these stay-at-home bees seem to exercise a sort of common overseership. They help those weighed down with too heavy a cargo to reach the city gates. If a lump of pollen is dropped in the general scuffle, these bees seize it and take it into the hive. Sometimes a bee comes eddying downward, smothered from head to foot with pollen, like a golden miller, and she is immedi- ately pounced upon by these superintendents, and combed free of her incommodious treasure. Others see to the grooming of the young bees, about to essay their first flight. The youngster sits up, protruding her tongue to its fullest extent, while half a dozen bees gather round her, licking and stroking her on every side. At last her toilette is done, and she is liberated, when, with a little flutter of her wings, she lifts high into the blue air and sun- shine and makes off with the rest tothe clover-fields, glittering afar off in the joyous midday light. Forinsensibly the hours have worn on—itis noon —and the tense thronging life, the deep rich labour- song, of the bee-garden seem to have reached their height. But suddenly a greater noise than ever arises on all sides : a steady stream of bees, larger and bulkier than the rest, is pouring out of every hive. The drones, the lazy brothers of these labo- rious vestals, have roused at last from their sleep, and are coming abroad for their daily flight. In twos and threes, in whole battalions, they hustle out, AT THE CITY GATES 65 and begin their noontide gambols about the hive, filling the air with a gay, roistering song. Ina little while they will be all gone to their revels, and the bee-garden will seem, by comparison, strangely quiet. But now the sudden accession of energy is unmistakable. With the awakening of the drones there seems to be a new spirit abroad. The air is no longer filled to overflow- ing with busy foragers. Many of these have joined the dance round the hives, so that each bee-dwelling is the centre of a singing, gambolling crowd, moved rather by a spirit of play, almost of idleness. But this brief moment of relaxation soon passes. The drones betake themselves to their marital pleasuring in the fields. The noisy midday symphony dies down to the old steady monotone of work. And the watcher at the gates of the bee-city turns to retrace his steps down the flower-garlanded way of the old pleas- ance, satiated with wonders, yet not satisfied, his curiosity only quickened a thousandfold for that which has been inexorably held from him, a glimpse of what is happening behind those baffling walls of straw. Wending slowly homeward, and pondering, he asks himself many questions. What is the reason, the final outcome, of all this earnest, well-directed labour? What is done with the pollen that has been carried in all the morning long? Where there is obviously so much system, and unanimity, 5 66 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE and ingenious division of endeavour, there cannot fail to be a supreme and governing intelligence to allot the part that each must play. This story of a queen—of a single bee, larger than all the rest, to whom all pay allegiance, and who spends her whole life in the dim labyrinth of the hive, like the Pope in the Vatican—is it a truth, or only a fig- ment of the ignorant, bucolic brain? If this queen exist, if every hive have indeed its absolute monarch, who directs the whole complex life and policy of the bee-city, where in the scale of reason- ing creatures must she be placed ? And then, if he be wise, the student will learn at last to give the picturesque old bee-garden its true appraisement. Ancient things conserve their beauty, and win the love of the right kind of lovers, more and more with every century that glides by. Only their usefulness, their import in the tide of human knowledge and progress, has gone with the years. It isso with the bee-garden under its Maytide robe of green leaves and rain- bow blossoms. It is beautiful in its glad appear- ances, its echo of old voices, its odour of the sanc- . tity in ancient ways and days. But it can tell us nothing of all we want to know. It can only ask us riddles to which we have no answers. For these we must set aside old fanciful scruples ; turn our backs, once for all, on its enchantment and its sweetness ; bend our steps unswervingly towards the great modern bee-farm on the hill. CHAPTER V THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE DOCTOR DRYASDUST will manage to impart to the truths he meddles with a dis- astrous air of dulness and stagnation ; but to walk in a fools’ paradise of beautiful, artistic error is to lay oneself open to an infinitely worse fate. There never was a truth in Nature that was dull or uninteresting, except in its human present- ment. There never was a pretty worthless fiction that did not show its dross and tinsel when brought out into the searching light of day. Romance, the spirit of poetry, have largely changed their venue of recent years. The unconscionable delver among old things, old thoughts, old conventions, on the strand of Time, has tarried so long in his one little florid corner that he is in some danger of being caught by the tide. He must soon either mend his pace or swim for it. Human regard is turning more and more towards those who deal in living verities—the men who search the stars, who win new powers out of the common air, who find at last the authentic teachings in the old worn 52 67 68 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE texts of the stones and brooks. These are the true poets, romancists, tellers of wondrous tales ; and these will hold the crowd—which is never far astray in its intuitions—when all the singers of sick fancies and the harpers on frayed golden strings have gone off in melancholy dudgeon to their own place. The old story—which has held such a long and honoured position in school text-books, and in the writings of those who tell of Nature’s wonders from the commanding watch-tower of the study fire—the old story of the queen-bee ruling her thirty or forty thousand dutiful subjects, and guiding them unerringly in all their marvellous exploits and enterprises, must go now with the rest. For the truth, as modern observers have unquestionably established it, is that the queen-bee is no ruler in the hive, but even a more obedient subject than any. The real instigators and contrivers of every- thing that takes place within the hive are the worker-bees themselves. The queen has neither part nor lot in the direction of the common polity ; nor has she any power, mental or physical, to help in the carrying out of public works. Her sole duty is that of motherhood, and even in this she derives all initiative from the sovereign worker- bees. She is little more than an ingenious piece of mechanism, and carefully guarded and cherished accordingly. She has certain propensities, and certain elemental passions, which she can always THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 69 be counted on to exercise in certain well-defined and limited ways. But as an intelligent, origin- ating force she counts for nothing. The mind in the hive is the collective mind of the whole colony, apart from the queen and drones—an hereditary, communal intellect evolved through the ages, the sum and total of all bee experience since the world of bees began. If, however, modern science compels us to divest the mother-bee of all her regal state and quality, and thus destroy one of the prettiest delu- sions of ancient times, it is only to take up a story of real life more alluring and romantic still, In the light of new understanding the old facts take on a mystery and excite a wonderment greater than ever before. If we found the life of the hive an enthralling study when we supposed it to originate from one winged atom endowed with acute and commanding abilities, how much more fascinating must it prove when we come to see that all this complex system of government is instituted and kept together by the harmonious working of tens of thousands of reasoning beings ? Reasoning—it is a big word, a double-edged thing that requires careful handling. We have been so long accustomed to use it only in regard to our own magnificent mental processes that it savours almost of the ridiculous to bring it to bear upon such a tiny et-cetera in the brute creation as the honey-bee. And yet, the deeper we go in the 70 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE study of the bee and all her works, the more diffi- cult it becomes to find a word that shall more fittingly meet the case. Instinct will not do. Instinct implies a dead perfection of motive, born of omniscience, working through unthinking, un- varying organisms to an equally perfect end. But in neither project nor performance can the honey-bee be said invariably to achieve, or even to aim at, perfection. It will be seen hereafter that her motives, her methods, the results she brings about, all show frequent, undeniable error or deviation. She attempts to carry through a sound enterprise, but abandons it on finding un- foreseen difficulties in the way. She will persevere blindly in an obviously foolish piece of business, and fail to see her mistake until both energy and resources are at an end. Sudden emergencies may find her ready with the saving stroke of last ingenuity, or merely plunge her into listless despair. Courage, industry, economy, wise forethought, or still wiser afterthought, are all common traits in her nature. But she may develop idleness, un- thrift, slovenliness, or even downright dishonesty, if chance or circumstance indicate the way. And what are all these but the defects or attributes of reason? If bees and men, each admittedly rooted in divinity, be prone to the like failings and inconse quences, who shall discriminate between them, dividing arbitrarily natural cause and effect ? THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 71 Watching bees at work for the first time through the glass panels of an observation hive, or in the almost equally informing modern hive with movable combs, this question continually arises, and there seems only one answer for it. There is something curiously human-like in their movements over the crowded combs, and the old comparison of a bee- hive to a city of men is never out of mind. There are the incessant hurryings to and fro; chance meetings of friends at odd street-corners ; alterca- tions where we can almost hear the surly complaint and tart reply; busy masons and tilers and warehouse-hands at work everywhere: a hundred different enterprises going forward in every throng- ing thoroughfare or narrow side-lane, from the great main entrance to the remotest drone-haunted corner of the hive. You will see the huge, full-bodied queen labour- ing over the combs from cell to cell, with a circle of attendants ever about her. In the highest stories of the hive the honey-makers are at work, pouring the new-garnered sweets into the vats, or sealing over with impervious wax the mature honey. Where the nurseries are estab- lished, in the central and warmest region of the hive, the nurse-bees are hurrying incessantly over the combs, looking into each cell to mark the progress of the larve; giving each its due ration of bee-milk ; or, when the time arrives, walling up the cell with a covering that shall insure its privacy, 72 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE but freely admit the air. Here and there the young bees have awakened from their transform- ing slumber, and are clamouring at the stoppings of their prenatal tombs, gnawing their way out _ vigorously, or thrusting forth red, glistening, ravenous tongues, eager to end their long fast. Where these raw youngsters have at last won their way into existence, they can be seen assiduously grooming themselves, or searching the neighbouring comb for honey, while the nurse-bees are busy cleaning out the cells, just vacated, to make them ready for the queen when she comes by on her next egg-laying round. And all these operations are going forward simultaneously on an incredibly large scale. Certain amazing scraps of information are given to the wondering on-looker, which he hears, but can, at this stage in his progress, seldom rightly estimate. He is told that the queen is the only mother-bee in the colony, large as it is; that, in the prime of her maternity, she will lay as many as 3,000 eggs a day; and that she has the power to produce either male or female eggs, or none at all, at will. He is told that, except when she leads forth the swarm, she goes out of the hive only once in her life, and this is her wedding-trip. On this one occasion she has traffic with the drone somewhere incredibly high up in the blue air and sunshine of the summer's day; and that immediate death is her suitor’s invariable portion; that she returns at once to the hive, and thereafter for the THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 73 rest of her life, which may endure for years, she passes her time in immaculate widowhood, yet retaining her fertility to the end. She is pointed out to the gaping novice as she travels her unceasing round of the brood-combs, and her various attributes are explained to him. He is shown how much larger she is than the worker- bee ; how her bodily structure differs in a dozen important ways ; how her instincts and habits re- semble those of the common worker hardly in a single particular. Finally he is told something at which the most polite credulity may well demur. Although the mother-bee is to all appearances of a totally different race, the egg from which she was raised was identical with that which produces the little worker. Her bodily size, the change in the number and shape of her organs, her mental dif- ferences, are all due to treatment and diet alone. There is no reason why she should not have been an ordinary neuter working-bee, nor why any one of the thirty or forty thousand little workersinahiveshould not have become a great queen-bee, the sole mother of an entire colony, save for the edict of the communal mind. More wonderful still, the drones, the male bees—the brothers, never the fathers, of theix own hive, as has been so often stated—owe the fact of their sex entirely to the will or whim of the hive authorities, working through the docile agency of the queen. Until the moment before the egg is laid, the question of the sex of the resulting bee 74 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE is held in abeyance. This big lusty drone, with exuberant masculinity obvious in every posture and act; his totally different organism; his in- capacity for anything else than the fulfilment of the one office required of him, for he cannot even ~~ entirely feed himself; his. habit of spending his life either in a comfortable lethargy of repletion at home, or in amorous knight-errantry abroad— this drone might have been a little plodding worker-bee, with shrunken yet elaborated body and curiously developed brain, whose one idea in life is to get through the largest amount of work before death claims her, and who is armed with a formidable poisoned sting, while the drone has none. It is useless at this stage to tell the learner that all these vital differences—miracles, indeed, in the ordinary meaning of the word—are brought about by the leading powers of the hive in certain simple, easily explainable ways. He has lost, for the moment, all sight of and interest in the details, however extraordinary, in the perception that has dawned on him of the vastness of the entire plan. Here is a community that, to all appearances, has solved every problem relating to the well-being and progress of a crowded, highly organised society. Questions that are now vexing socialistic philosophers in the human world, or are looming dark intheimmediate future—problemsof numerical increase in relation to food-supply, the balance of THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 75 the sexes, communal or individual ownership in property, due qualification for parenthood, the hegemony of might or right—all seem to have been happily settled long ago in this remarkable bee-commonwealth. In itself a prosperous, well- conducted hive appears to offer a living example, a perfect object-lesson of what Socialism, carried out to its last and sternest eonclusions, must mean to human and apiarian communities alike. Here is a number of individuals—counting anything from ten thousand to fifty or sixty thousand, according to their condition and the time of year—living heathily and comfortably in the space of a few cubic feet. The principle, all for the greatest good of the greatest number, is elevated into a prime maxim, to which every one must bow. The fiction of royalty is maintained in harmony with the perfect republican spirit. The females are supreme in everything, the males in nothing. Growth of population is accelerated or retarded, according to estimations of the immediate or future supply of food. The proportion of the sexes is varied at will. The rule, that those who cannot work must not live, is applied with relent- less consistency. All the garnered wealth of the State is held in common for the common good. When the settlement becomes too populous, and the boundaries cannot be extended, a large part of its inhabitants are forced to emigrate, taking with them only so much of the state property as 76 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE they can carry in their haversacks, and relinquish- ing all claim to the rest. The governing females have apparently agreed among themselves that only one of their number shall exercise the privi- lege of motherhood; and when her fertility declines, she is deposed, and a new mother-bee, specially raised for the purpose, installed in her place. All these, and a host of other facts as to bee- life, are crowded into the bewildered brain of the tiro until its capacity is exhausted, and he can take no more. He begins to see, at length, that he is approaching a great matter too fast, and from the wrong direction. Like a scholar who, resolving on a new and difficult branch of study, commences at the end of his treatise instead of at the beginning, he finds himself in the midst of terms and equations of which he knows nothing. All this desultory peering into hive-windows, and listening to scraps of astounding information, is nothing but opening the book of bee-life here and there at odd disjointed pages, getting a swift impression of certain lurid, kaleidoscopic details, but no grounding in the consecutive science of the facts. There is nothing for it—if he be resolved to know the life of the honey-bee truly—but to turn back to the first page of the volume, and steadily work his way through to the end—/f end there be. Allknow the English honey-bee—the Black Bee, as ‘she is called, partly to distinguish her from her THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 77 foreign rivals, and partly, it would seem, because she is not black at all, but a rich brown—but all do not know her origin. Probably she came to us from the tropics by easy stages, swarm out- flying swarm, until the most adventurous crossed the English Channel in remote ages, when it was only a narrow race of water, or even before Great Britain was detached from the mainland. It was the black bee, and not the motley- coloured Italian or other varieties, who came to us thus, for the same reason, probably, that the Celts came—because they were a hardy race, loving, and being more fitted for the bracing northern atmosphere than the heat and languor of the south. Modern bee-breeders who are trying so hard to acclimatise in Britain the golden-girdled or silver-fringed bee-races of other lands, might well ponder this fact. No keener controversy rages to-day among English bee-masters than this one of the relative merits of native and foreign stocks. But assuredly Nature has not erred in this respect. South Down sheep can be reared in any county, but nowhere so fine as on the Sussex Downs. The like principle holds good with the English bee. The ages have evolved her from her tropic beginnings to make her what she is—a doughty, essentially British creature, thriving against all odds of fickle climate, when her more tender sisters from the south are hard put to it for a living. She has held her own against them, 78 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE and more than her own. In bumper seasons, such as we get all too rarely, when, in sober truth, the land is flowing with honey, there is little to choose between the rival honey-makers. But through good and bad, early and late, for steady, dogged industry, invincible hardihood, tangible results, the English black bee has out-distanced all competitors. Thousands of years have gone to her making, and thousands more may conceivably fit the yellow-skirted Ligurian for British work. But labour for so remote a posterity were altruism meeter for angels than for men. In her old primeval fastnesses the honey-bee is little likely to have troubled herself with hive- making, but to have hung her combs to some convenient branch in the forest, much as the bees in India do to-day. The habit of seeking some hollow tree or cleft in the rock grew upon her probably as she advanced northward, and some nightly or seasonal shelter became more and more an imperious need. The present-day customs of wild creatures give some inkling of their ancestral ways, but it is in their occasional aberrations from these customs that we get the truest indications of what their original state must have been. Lost swarms of bees, if they fail to pitch upon some better site, will often build in the open, either suspending their waxen houses from some horizontal branch, or making them in the heart of a thick bush. THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 79 The ways of the honey-bee are full of such deviations, due, perhaps, to the working of old ancestral memory rousing dimly in the midst of modern needs. The issue of a swarm may be nothing else than the survival of an old process, vital enough in its day, but, under the present civilised conditions of bee-life, lacking the whet of entire necessity. For, in all respects, the life of the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved civilisation, and not a surviving, aboriginal state. It is con- ceivable that the foxes have their holes, and the birds their nests, much after the same fashion as in the days when Adam invented love-making. But the twentieth-century honey-bee is not of this kind. The communal habit itself may even have been a comparatively late introduction in her progress. It is possible to get some idea of the path she won for herself through the ages by studying the ways of creatures now living, but immeasurably less advanced than the bee. There are distant connections of hers—lonely little wood- wasps and others—which never associate with their kind, but get through the short summer hours in solitude, and die with the waning season, leaving the perpetuation of their species to the children they never see. The common wasp is nearer the honey-bee in development, but still infinitely far behind. The fecundated queen-wasp comes out of her winter hiding-place, fashions a cell or two in some hole in the ground, and 80 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE deposits her first eggs, thus laying the foundation of a colony which, populous enough in the season, must nevertheless perish with the next winter chills. In the primzval tropics the honey-bees may have lived in separate families, each with its teeming mother, its indolent, lie-abed father—the Turveydrop of creation—and its bevy of youngsters, every one going out, when grown, to establish a home for itself. The modern bee-city, with its complicated systems and laws, and its innumerable multitudes, may have originated only when change of habitat and climate brought about the necessity for a new order of things. Living in perpetual warmth, in a land where blossom followed blossom in unending succession, there would be no need for such co-operation. The one little family, snugging close in its moss-roofed corner, could sustain its own temperature; and where there was unceasing array of nectar-producing flowers, fore- sight would have been folly: the winter larder would have been left to take care of itself. But as the young bees, leaving their homes, and flying ever northward, came first into temperate zones, and then into the fringe of Arctic influences, the conditions gradually changed. The perpetual sipping-garden was left behind; and a season came in each year—short at first, but inevitably lengthen- ing—when there were no flowers. Hard necessity must have taught the bee, then, first to gather THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 81 together with her kind for warmth during the cold season; and then, as this got longer and longer, to make some food-provision for winter days that would eke out endurance until the spring sun again wooed the earth into flower-giving. Thus the first communal bee-nests must have been evolved from the universal need of the race: the first common storehouses instituted : a host of un- foreseen difficulties and side-issues encountered, and means for dealing with them contrived. The spirit of invention must have been busy then with the race, and taxed to the limit, of her resources. For?never did Pandora open celestial casket upon earth with more redoubtable consequences, than when the Great Artificer set up the honey-bee as an examplar of city-building to the nomadic world of men. From the crowding together of the separate bee-families for mutual protection against the ele- ments, to a complete and permanent fusion of life and interests, must have been only a step, as Nature works. But then there must have been Stirring times—social upheavals, educative dis- asters, a cataclysmic war of sex. Bee-life must have been shaken to its very foundations. When and how the woman-bee first got the upper hand in the direction of affairs, it is unimportant to determine. But it is certain that she got it, and has kept it ever since. The population problem must have been the great, overwhelming one. 6 82 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE With hundreds of prolific mothers in the hive, each having enough to do at home in rearing her own children, and a crowd of lazy, irresponsible drones who could do nothing but dance in the sunshine or go a-wooing, how were the daily needs of the hive to be satisfied, leaving out of account the provision that must be made for coming winter days? It was clearly a case of reform or annihila- tion ; and it may be conceived that the woman- bees, in default of masculine initiative, took the reins into their own hands. It is a prophetic story. First they discovered their latent powers. The harmless ovipositor revealed itself as a prime weapon of offence. Thus the army was with the revolutionaries, and the rest was easy. A great, far-reaching scheme was set afoot. Motherhood was to be a privilege of the few and the fittest; work the compulsory lot of the mass. Hard times had already bred a lean, unfertile gang among them, and it was dis- covered that famine rations in the nursery rneant a wholesale increase in these natural spinsters of the race. Henceforth the little sex-atrophied worker-bee was multiplied in the hive, while the fully nurtured mothers were gradually reduced to a few—at last to one alone. It was a triumph of collective self-sacrifice for the well-being and high persistence of the race. All this may be imagined as having taken place in infinitely remote times, long before man suc- THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 83 ceeded in distinguishing himself from the apes. In the honey-bee of to-day, and her life in the modern hive, we get a sort of quintessence of the ages ; a creature developed in mind and body by her unique conditions, these conditions again imposing upon her unique systems of life. Like Ruskin’s Venetian, she must live nobly or perish. Much more is required of her than the réle of domestic and political economist. To make the modern beehive a possibility there must be architects, mathematicians, and chemists within its walls. Sanitary science must have its skilled ex- ponents, or the hive would change into a death- trap within a few hours. There must be land- surveyors ready to explore the country, just before the issue of the swarms, to determine for them their new location. There must be overseers, gang-forewomen, everywhere to superintend every work in progress throughout the hive. Above all, there must be a supreme central power, a far- seeing intelligence, to divine the imminent com- mon need, and to set the forces of the State to work, in right time and order, to provide for it. If all these cannot be proved to exist in a hive of bees to-day, at least the necessity for them is undeniable; and as undeniable, the achieved results. CHAPTER VI EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY HE “turn of the days,” when the winter sun has passed its nadir of feebleness and just made its earliest wan recovery in the skies, marks the true beginning of the honey-bee’s year. Then the first few eggs are laid in the heart of the brood-nest; the drowsy cluster begins to show an interest in life; the water-carriers bestir themselves, watching for a bright warm morning that they may sally forth to ply their trade. Dangerous work it is at this season, yet most necessary. Without water the rearing of the young bees is impossible on any but the smallest scale. Water is needed at every stage of their development, and, lacking it, the progress of the colony must be fatally checked. Even the mature bees will starve and die in the midst of plenty, if their honey-stores are candied, and no water is available to dissolve the inassimilable sweets. The hive that shows honey crystals thrown down on the floor, and littering the entrance, is sure to 84 EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 85 be in desperate case. The bees are tearing open every store-cell, casting away the solidified honey as refuse, to get at the moister portion below.. It the cold spell does not break, or the bee-master is unready with his artificial supplies, the colony must perish. So the water-bearers watch for the sunshine, and its first warm glance brings them out to rifle the nearest dewdrops, or track down by its bubbling music the hidden woodland stream. Many die at this work in the early months of the year, chilled by their load on the homeward journey, or snapped up by hungry birds. But at every cost the future life of the colony must be assured, though, of all the hive-people, none but the queen-mother will be alive to see it in its summer fulness. We are accustomed to think of a hive of bees as a permanent institution, Death playing his old, unceasing, busy part, but young Life more than outplaying him, just as the way is in a city-hive of men. The analogy holds good, but in bee- life the changes are infinitely more rapid. The life of the .worker-bee extends, at most, to six months or so; and in the busy season she may die, worn out by labour, in as many weeks. The reapers of last year’s honey-harvest were dead by the autumn. The late-born bees, that went into winter quarters with polished thorax and ragged wings, survived only long enough to nurture their immediate successors; and these, again, will live 86 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE but to bring to maturity the young spring-broods. Not a bee among them will ever again go honey- gathering. Except for the long-lived queen- mother, and the old hive and its furniture, each colony with every year becomes a totally new thing. Hibernation, in the true sense of the word, has no part in bee-life. The queen-wasp and count- less other creatures hibernate, passing the cold months in a torpor of sleep until the enduring warmth of another year lures them back to active existence. But the honey-bees have a better way : they gather together in a dense, all but motion- less cluster in the heart of the hive, with their precious queen in their midst and their food-stores above them. At this time honey is their only necessary food, and very little of this suffices to keep up the needful temperature of the colony. When they are out and about at their work, or busy within the hive, the nitrogenous pollen must be added to their daily ration of nectar to build up wasted tissues; but now honey, the nectar con- centrated, the heat-producer, is all. they want. The bees of the cluster nearest to the combs broach the full cells beneath them, and the honey is passed through the crowd, each bee getting its scanty dole. Economy is now reduced to a fine art. None knows when a fresh supply may be available, although no chance will be lost to replenish the NACNW9-Ha8 AHL NI YALNIM EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 87 larder at the first sign of returning warmth. But now the barest minimum of food is taken, and as the nearest cells become emptied of their contents, the cluster moves a step upward. Thus there isa system of slow browsing over the combs, until the dense flock of bees has reached the highest limit of the hive, when new grazing-ground must be taken. But the movement of the cluster is exceedingly slow, perhaps the slowest thing in the animate world. All recognise that existence depends on the stores being eked out to their uttermost. It is a scientific damping-down of the fires of life—a carefully thought-out and perfected plan for pre- serving the greatest possible number of worker- bees alive on the smallest practicable amount of food, so that the largest possible army of nurse- bees and foragers may be at hand in the spring- time to raise the young bees that are to represent the future colony. But there is no hibernation. It is doubtful even if bees ever sleep, either in their season of greatest activity or in the coldest depths of winter. At all times a slight rap on the hive will awaken an immediate timorous outcry within. Sturdy knocking will soon bring the guard-bees to the entrance to find out the cause of the disturbance, and many bees lose their lives from this vigilant habit alone. On frosty days the tits may often be seen perched on the entrance-board of a hive, beating out a noisy tattoo, and snapping up every 88 THELORE OF THE HONEY-BEE bee that emerges; and many other small birds have discovered the same never-failing source of a meal. The fact that, with a healthy stock of bees, the interior of a hive always preserves its clean con- dition, is usually a great puzzle to the novice. In the summer, when the bees are passing continually in and out, this is not so vast a matter for wonder. But in winter-time, when the colony is confined to the hive often for weeks together, it is remark- able that neither the combs nor floor of the hive are ever soiled by excreta. This is a difficulty that the sanitary department in the hive has successfully coped with long ago. It must have been one of the earliest problems that presented itself when the honey-bee first evolved the com- munal habit. The Ancients believed that all the excreta of the hive were deposited by the bees in certain privy-cells, and thence removed at intervals by the scavenging authorities. There is nothing in this notion, absurd as it is, outside the scope of bee-ingenuity ; on the contrary, such a crude device would be little likely to commend itself to the hive- people, as it would be ridiculously inadequate to the case. How great must be the problem of the preservation of cleanliness in a hive can only be understood when the whole conditions are con- sidered together, and that from a human stand- point. Putting the figures unwarrantably low, what measure of success could the greatest genius EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 89 that ever lived among sanitary scientists ever hope to achieve, if he were given the task of keeping in cleanly condition, perfect ventilation, and even temperature, a building where 10,000 individuals were crowded together storey above storey—a building hermetically sealed throughout except for one small opening at the lowest level, which must serve for all purposes of entrance and exit to its denizens, as well as sole conduit for the removal of the foul air and introduction of the pure? The task would be gigantic enough in the summer-time, when a large proportion of the inhabitants were away at work during a greater part of the day; but in winter, when all were continuously at home for weeks together, what conceivable device, or combination of devices, could prevent the building soon developing into first a quagmire and then a charnel-house, to which the Black Hole of Calcutta would be a model Sanitary retreat ? Yet the difference between such a building and a beehive is only one of degree. The same con- ditions are involved, and the same evils must be combated. Relatively, the problem is the same in each. In the case of the beehive, the necessity for this close system of life has been very gradually imposed on its inhabitants ; and age-long custom, working on the individual, has at length produced a race marvellously adapted to its special needs. Probably the habit of retention of faeces while in go THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE the hive was at first a voluntary one. This, carried on from generation to generation, would react on the physical organism until use became second nature, and finally the present condition was reached, It is a fact that the bee is now incapable of voiding its excreta within the hive, or when at rest. The muscles involved can come into action only during, or immediately after, vigorous flight. In the winter, when long spells of cold occur, not a bee leaves the hive perhaps for weeks together; but an hour’s warm sunshine will in- fallibly bring the whole company out in a little eddying crowd about the hive, and then the necessary action of nature can readily be seen. These cleansing flights occur on all practicable occasions, and fulfil a double purpose; for when the cluster forms again, it will be between combs where the stores are unexploited, and the old, steady, upward feeding-march begins again in a new place. In extraordinary seasons, when the cold weather is much prolonged, the population of a hive may die of starvation within reach of plenty, no opportunity for these flights having presented itself, and the cluster therefore not having left its original station. And here the bee is plainly the victim of her own advanced acumen. Instinct would never have led her into such a foolish plight ; but reason, being liable to err, errs here egregiously. The comparison of a modern beehive with a EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY gi building similar in construction, and as densely crowded with human beings, brings the whole problem to a sharp definition. In such a building, unless a through-current of air could be estab- lished, the preservation of life must soon become impossible. Yet the bees have triumphantly over- come all difficulties. Whether in winter or summer, the air within the hive is almost as pure as that in the open, while the temperature can be regulated at will. For the ordinary purposes of the hive— honey-brewing, and the hatching of the young brood—it is kept uniformly at 80° to 85°. When the wax-makers are at work, it rises suddenly to 95° or so, while at the time of the swarming- fever it is often allowed to go even higher. In the hottest days of summer, however, unless the emigration-furore possesses the colony, the interior of a well-made hive seldom shows a temperature of more than 80°. And all this is brought about in a very simple fashion. The sanitary expert, of merely human stock, could attack the problem in only one way. He must have a through-current of air, impelled either mechanically or automatically ; and he must have heating-apparatus acting within the building itself, or warming the incoming draught of air. But the bees work on totally different principles. They will have nothing to do with the through-current system of ventilation. If the ingenious bee-master pierce air-holes in the walls of a hive, the bees 92 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE will spend the night in carefully stopping them up again. In the old bee-garden we saw the fanning- army drawing out the impure air. These bees had their heads pointing towards the entrance ; but, inside the hive, there was another army of fanners, facing the opposite way, and thus helping to drive the same sidelong current. Throughout nearly the whole interior of the hive on hot days fanning-bees can be seen, all helping to keep up this movement. The result is that the pure air, being sucked in at one side of the entrance, flows round the hive and travels out at the other side, much as a rope goes over a pulley-block. The swiftest current of air keeps to the walls and roof of the hive, the air in the centre being changed more slowly. Thus the honeycombs, which are always in the upper stories, lie in the full stream, and the moisture, which the maturing honey is continually giving off, is carried rapidly away ; while the brood-combs, lying in the lower, central part, are ventilated more slowly, the air being thoroughly warmed before it reaches them. The larger the fanning-army is, the more swiftly flows the air, and the faster the heat of the hive is carried off. In this way the bees can regulate the hive-temperature to the requirements of the moment, putting more numerous gangs to work in the hottest season, or stopping the fanners alto- gether in mid-winter, when the natural, buoyant heat-exhalation from the cluster is sufficient to EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 93 keep up the gentle circulation which then is alone needed. Sometimes, when the colony is unusually large, the fanning-party will be divided into two detach- ments, one at each side of the entrance, leaving the centre for the inflow of air. In this case a double-loop system of ventilation appears to be formed. CHAPTER VII THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN T has been said that the ways of the honey- bee are nearly all subject to variation—that in bee-life there are few hard-and-fast, undeviating laws. The rule, of one queen-mother only to each hive, appears to be more absolute than any other, yet it is not without its exceptions. Well authen- ticated instances are on record where two queens have existed amicably in the same hive, each laying her daily quota of eggs unmolested by the other, and, apparently, with the full approval of the hive-authorities. It is now also certain that a skilful bee-master can accustom his bees to the presence of more than one queen. Recent experiments in America on this head, although convincing enough as far as they go, need the test of time before their practical value to apiculture can be rightly esti- mated. To multiply its domestic deities may prove anything but a blessing to the harmony and welfare of a hive. But the fact has been well established that the old rule, of one queen at a 94 YY YY ¥"* Ny te ane, WYVA, ~A : A ¥ ‘y s an 4 ~ 3 THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 95 time, may be upset—whether permanently, and for the ultimate advantage of honey-making, time alone can tell. A single queen, when young and vigorous and of good blood, is able to keep an entire hive filled with brood throughout the short honey-gathering season. The brood-nest of a modern frame-bar hive has a comb-surface of over 2,000 square inches, giving about 50,000 cells available for the breeding of young worker-bees. This represents, at times of greatest prosperity, an enormous floating population; but if several queens can be permanently established in one hive, and the hives enlarged to permit each her fullest scope, the figures will soon begin to stretch out into infinity. Two facts are well known to experienced bee-keepers—that a large stock gathers more honey than two small stocks containing between them the same number of individuals; and that, when the honey-crop is in full yield, there are seldom enough bees to harvest it. The whole art of latter-day bee-keeping consists in bringing up the numerical strength of each colony to its fullest in time for the great main nectar-flow. Yet, ina good district and in a good season, when huge areas of clover or sainfoin come into full blossom at the same time, and the nectar must be gathered or lost within the space of a fortnight or so, the most populous apiary is seldom equal to the task. Probably, in exceptional seasons, half the English 96 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE honey-crop is lost for want of bees to gather it. If, therefore, the new system of plurality of queens both justifies and establishes itself, the near future may see a revolution in all ideas relating to bee- manship. All that can be said for certain at present is that as many as five queens have been induced to occupy the same hive in peace and quiet together; but whether this portentous state of affairs can remain a lasting one is still to be proved. A curious and, to the expert, a startling outcome of these efforts to break down an old and almost universal custom in bee-life, is that the successful establishment of several mother-bees in a single hive appears to lessen the swarming impulse. Hives so treated do not send out a swarm so far as is known. One of the most disappointing experiences in bee-craft is to see prosperous stocks breaking themselves up into several hopelessly weak detachments just before the great honey- flow, when strength of numbers is the one vital thing; and if plurality of queens will prevent this vexatious evil, the old time-honoured custom is sure to go. The student of bee-life, watching the year’s work in the hive from its earliest beginnings, and marking its steady, cautious development, will readily see how the ancient idea of the mother- bee’s absolute monarchy gained its vogue. The deception of appearances is all but complete. THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 97 Right in the heart of the winter-cluster he sees the queen bestirring herself to lay the first eggs, and the bees around her slowly awakening to the duty before them. With the passing of the weeks, he sees the brood-area steadily enlarging ; the hitherto close-packed throng of workers gradually extending itself over a larger space of comb; the water-fetchers increasingly busy; the pollen- gathering bees already at work in the crocus- borders of the garden, where the year’s first gold and white and purple is gaily flaunting in the sun. He notes that the progress of the colony within the warm hive does not go by the calendar, but . . Checks with each return of cold, and forges ahead only when the spring seems to be coming in right good earnest. He sees, even now, when February is waning and the hazel-catkins fill the bare wood- land with a shimmer of emerald, that the colony still husbands its stores, eking them out with a long-sighted parsimony that shall be more than justified when the inevitable cold break comes in the flowery midst of the English May. It is impossible to overlook the evidence of a wise, directing mind through it all; and where should this be seated but in the brain of the single large bee, courted and fed and groomed unceasingly by the attendant host around her—she who is the teeming mother of past tens of thousands, and who carries in her body the seed of all the generations to come? 7 98 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE Yet the truth is that the queen-bee is the very reverse of a monarch, both by nature and inclina- tion. She possesses only the merest rudiments of intelligence. She has a magnificent body, great docility, certain almost unrestrainable impulses and passions, a yielding, womanish love of the yoke; but she is incapable of action other than that arising from her bodily promptings. Her brain is much smaller than that of the worker. In a dozen different ways she is inferior to the common worker-bees, who rule her absolutely, mapping out her entire daily life and using her for the good of the colony, just as a delicate, costly piece of mechanism is used by human craftsmen to produce some necessary article of trade. In a word, the queen is the sole surviving representative of the aboriginal female honey-bee. The aborted females, the workers, are almost as much a product of civilisation as the human race itself. Every step of the way now, in a study of the life of the bee, is hedged about with wonders. It is seen that the common worker-bee is raised in a cell allowing her only the barest minimum of space for development, while the queen has an apartment twice as long as she can possibly need. The worker-cells are so designed that as many as possible may be contained in a given area, and their construction involve the least possible amount of material. Therefore these cells are made in the THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 99 form of a hexagon, this being the only shape approaching the cylindrical—the ideal form—of which a number will fit together over a plane surface without leaving useless spaces in between. Moreover, the cells needing to be closed at the bottom, half the material required for this purpose is saved by the device of placing the sheets of combined hexagons back to back, so that one base will serve for two cells. But it is not only in the construction of the cradles of the worker-bees that rigid economy is practised. From the moment that the egg hatches until the young grub changes into the chrysalis state, it is given only the smallest quantity of food that will support life and allow necessary development. In the case of the young queen-larva, however, avery different policy is instituted from the begin- ning. Not only is she given nursery-quarters allowing every facility for growth, but she is loaded with a specially rich kind of food night and day, until she actually swims in it. The nurse-bees are constantly pouring this glistening white substance into the cell for the whole five days of her larval existence, and the effect of this generous diet is obvious from the first in her more rapid growth, as compared with the worker-bee. A further advantage still is that the young queen has perfectly free access to the air at all stages of her development. The worker-cell is but sparsely ventilated, and that only through the narrow top, 7—2 100 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE all its six sidesand base being absolutely impervious. But the cradle-cell of the queen is not only made of a porous material throughout, but it is commonly placed at the edge of the comb, where it stands out in the full current of ventilation, the air per- colating the whole substance of its walls in addi- tion to entering freely at the large cell-mouth. Thus the main cause of the extraordinary difference in the development of the queen-bee and the worker is that of treatment; the one being given unlimited rich food and oxygen and room to grow in, the other receiving only meagre workhouse diet, restricted quarters, and little air to breathe. Yet, making every allowance for the stimulating or retarding effect of these agencies on the young female grub, we are still hardly any nearer to a solution of the mystery. We are compelled to believe that the egg which produces the worker is identical in its nature with that from which is evolved the queen-bee, because a simple experi- ment will at once dispel all doubt on the matter. If the egg deposited in the queen-cell be removed, and an egg taken from any one of the thousands of worker-cells in a hive be put in its place, the worker-egg will always produce a fully developed and accoutred queen-bee. On the other hand, if an egg be taken from a queen-cell and placed in a worker-cell, it will as infallibly hatch out into a common undersized worker. It would be sufficient tax on the credibility if the differences of queen THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 101 and worker were only those of degree. If the queen were nothing but a large-sized worker-bee, in whom certain organs—which were atrophied in the worker—had received their full development, it would be a fact within comprehension ; but the queen differs from the worker not only in size and the capability of her organism, but also on several important points of structure. And how can mere food and air and circumstance produce structural change? The worker has many bodily appliances, special members ingeniously adapted to her daily tasks, of which the queen is wholly destitute ; while the physical organism of the queen varies from that of the worker in several important degrees. Some of these must be enumerated. The ab- domen of the worker is comparatively short and rounded : that of the queen is larger and longer, and comes to a fairly sharp point. The jaws of the queen are notched on their inner cutting edge: the worker's jaws are smooth like the edge of a knife. The tongue of the worker has a spatula at its extremity, and is furnished with sensitive hairs: the tongue of the queen is shorter, the spatula is smaller, while the hairs show greater length. The worker-bee has a complicated system of wax-secreting discs under the horny plates of her abdomen: in the queen these are absent, nor can the most elementary trace of them be dis- covered, In their nerve-systems the two show 102 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE difference, the queen possessing only four abdominal ganglia, while the worker has five. The queen’s sting is curved, and longer than the worker’s: the sting of the worker-bee is perfectly straight. On their hind-legs the workers have a curious con- trivance which bee-keepers have named the pollen- basket. It is a hollowing of the thigh, the cavity being surrounded with stiff hairs; and within this the pollen is packed and carried home to the hive. In the queen both the cavity and the hairs are absent. Her colour also is generally different from that of the worker-bee, her legs, in particular, being a much redder brown. Here is a problem for our great biologists—a problem, however, at which the plain, every-day man may well flinch. For we seem to have come face to face with new principles of organic life, facts incompatible with the accepted ideas of the inevitable relation between cause and effect. The irresistible tendency at this stage is to hark back ; to repeat the experiment of the transposed eggs, and see whether no vital, initial circumstance has been overlooked. But the result is always the same. Nor can the most careful microscopical dissection of the eggs themselves reveal any differ- ences. In this mystery of the structural variance between queen and worker, it would seem that we are forced to accept one of three alternatives. Either the egg contains two distinct germs of life, one developing only under the stress of hard times, THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 103 the other only to the call of luxury. Or we must go back to medizval notions, and believe that the worker-bees give or withhold some vital principle of their own during nurturing operations. Or we must give up the problem, and decide that creation works on lines very different from those on which we have hitherto grounded our faith. The difficulty is further complicated by the fact that this change of nature does not take place until relatively late in the life of the bee. The egg is three days in hatching. But the young larva is at least three more days old before nature has made the irrevocable step along either of the divergent ways. For the experiment of transposition can be made with exactly the same result if undertaken with female bee-larve not more than three days old, instead of the unhatched eggs. Indeed, this is an operation that the nurse-bees themselves perform, on occasion. If a hive loses its queen, and it happens that all the eggs in the worker-cells are hatched out, the bees will breed another queen from any one of the worker-larve available. This is generally successful when the young grub has not passed the three days’ limit. But, even when all the larvz of the hive are older than this, the bees will still attempt the task, knowing well that, without a queen, the colony must perish. In this case, however, the resulting queen will be defective in various ways. Probably she will never be capable of fertilisation, and therefore the breed of 104 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE worker-bees will be cut off at its source. Unless the bee-master supplies the colony with a new queen, properly fecundated, the hive will gradually fill up with drones, the old worker-bees will die off, and the stock must ultimately become extinct. When once the study of the inner life of the honey-bee has been undertaken, the watcher will soon realise that he has embarked on a stranger voyage than he ever contemplated, even in his most daring moments. In the old bee-garden there was a serenity, a quiet enduring bliss of ignorance, that chimed in well with his slothful, holiday mood. The sunshine, the flowers, the song of the wind in the tree-tops, and the drowsy song of the hives; the voice of the old white-headed cottager weaving in his listener’s ear the old, com- fortable arabesque of error; the sudden, jubilant uproar of a swarm, filling the blue sky with music and the flash of unnumbered wings; the night- quiet, with its deep underground bee-murmur, its dim half-moon peering over the hill-top, the shadowy bent figure of the old beeman listening at hive-doors for the battle-cry of rival queens, that should mean trouble on the morrow—it all comes back to the watcher now as a haven he has left in- considerately, for a voyage over unknown, stormy seas. For now, with the inner life of the hive going on unmasked before his very eyes, wonder succeeds wonder almost without a break; and each new fact that reveals itself is more perturbing, THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 105 because more destructive of old, hallowed conven- tion, than any that has gone before. The hive that has lost its mother-bee, and failed to provide her with a fully developed, fertile suc- cessor, is seen to be rapidly declining in its worker- population, while the horde of drones is increasing at a greater rate than ever. But where do these drones come from, if the very fount of bee-life has been dried up at its source by the loss of a ferti- lised queen? The question brings the student to what is perhaps the most remarkable fact in the whole great book of natural history. We are not concerned, for the moment, with theological matters; nor will the thread of the story of the honey-bee be laid down, however briefly, for an excursion into the pulpit. Yet here is something that may well give wherewithal for thought. For nearly two thousand years the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth has been the centre of a bitter human controversy. Its liegemen uphold it as a main article of faith, eternally exalted from the odious need of proof; its temperate opposers sadly and quietly set it aside as a natural impossibility. On one side the charge is want of faith; on the other of blind credulity. And yet noone seems to have thought of looking into paths of creation other than human, to see if no parallel exists that may help both sides, and send the swords to sheath before a common mystery. The honey-bee is small among the fowls, but here she looms large in the world, a ~ 106 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE portentous symbol. It is a fact, now incontestably proved, that the virgin queen-bee is capable of re- producing her kind, yet only the male of the species. If she is born late in the year, when no drones exist, and her fertilisation is therefore im- possible, or if some imperfection of wing prevents her going out for her mating-flight, she will still set busily to work at her one function of egg- laying; and these eggs will all hatch out into male bees. The same thing occurs in the case of the queenless hive, which, having neither worker-egg nor worker-grub, whose age is under the three days’ limit, yet tries to raise a new queen from a larva perhaps four or even five days old. The queen thus created is queen only in name. She may have her ovaries completely developed, but otherwise she will be congenitally destitute. She will have neither the will nor power to receive the drone ; and the eggs that she lays so industriously only add to the crowd of useless males that will soon be the sole representatives of the doomed household. Following the progress of a bee-colony through the mounting days of spring, we see, with every week that passes, a larger area of comb occupied by the young worker-brood ; while about the middle of April the queen pays her first visit to the drone-combs, laying a single egg in each cell, as with the rest. It is commonly supposed that the queen is always surrounded by an adu- AaM SSE NaNO AHL ‘NOSVAS-ONIGHaNd NI AAd-NaaANO (INW SAdIN9 AO AIDNID MAH HALIM SONIAWT AO LD THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 107 latory retinue, each attendant bee keeping her head respectfully towards her sovereign, and back- ing before her as she progresses over the combs. Something of this sort is constantly seen during breeding-time, but at other seasons the queen ordinarily receives little attention, passing to and fro in the hive with no more ceremony than is bestowed on any other of the bees. The medizval writers were aware that the queen had these attendants, and believed them always to be twelve in number, representing the twelve Apostles. A little observation, however, will soon make it clear that the bees which surround the queen on her egg-laying journeys are neither devotees nor cour- tiers. They are actually her guides, her keepers. The queen’s movements are all prompted by the incessant strokings and pushings and gentle touches of the antenne that she receives from these. Thus they allow her free passage over the combs, but stop her at each vacant cell, gathering close about her, evidently with the most absorbing anxiety and interest in the operation. First, she peers into the cell, examining it carefully. Then she rears ; the bees give way before her ; she takes a step or two onward until the end of her body is over the cell. And then she thrusts her abdomen deep into it, pauses a moment, mounts again upon the comb, and the attendant bees at once resume charge of her, and manceuvre her towards the next empty cell. This process never 108 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE seems hurried, and yet in the height of the breed- ing season it must go on at an extraordinary pace. It is well attested that a good queen will thus furnish as many as two thousand to three thousand cells in a day, which gives an average of two eggs a minute, even supposing her to keep at the work without pause for the whole twenty-four hours. The cells designed to contain the worker-brood measure one-fifth of an inch across the mouth ; drone cells are larger, having a diameter of a quarter-inch, as well as greater depth. The queen may pass from one species of comb to the other, but she seldom makes a mistake. The egg depo- sited in the worker-cell hatches out a female; that which is laid in the larger cell becomes a drone, or male bee. Obviously the deposition of the diffe- rent kinds of eggs is well under the control of the queen. It will be also seen that not only does the mother bee lay either male or female eggs at will, but their number also is subject to her dis- crimination. From the time when she begins Ovipositing, until she reaches her period of greatest activity in early summer, the increase of the colony is not regular, but goes by fits and starts according to the weather, or the amount of incoming food. If the new honey is steadily mounting up in the storehouse, and pollen is plenti- ful, the work of brood-raising will go freely ahead; but if unseasonable cold stops the work of the foragers, this will immediately affect the output of THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 10g the queen, and under exceptionally adverse condi- tions egg-laying may be entirely arrested. This may also take place in the height of the season, and in full favour of sunshine and plenty, if the hive is a small one, and the limit of its capacity has been reached. The combs will then be full of either honey or brood, and the queen must wait until laying space can be cleared for her. That she is able to do this—that her powers can be augmented or restrained, according to the needs of the colony, and that the proportion of the sexes in the hive can be varied at will to suit like con- tingencies—-can only be understood when the details of her life-history have been passed under review. In the normal, prosperous colony, which we are now studying, the queen will be in her prime, and under natural conditions will remain at the head of affairs until she goes out with the first swarm in May or June.