Part 6

"When he found his hives attacked and their store of honey pillaged by these depredators, he contracted the opening left for the exit and entrance of the bees to such an extent as, while it allowed them free ingress and egress, it was so small that their plunderers could not pass through it. This was found to be perfectly effectual, and all pillage was thenceforward discontinued in the hives thus protected.

"But it happened that in some of the hives this precaution was not adopted, and here the most wonderful proceeding on the part of the bees took place. Human contrivance was brought into immediate juxtaposition with apiarian ingenuity.

"The bees of the undefended hives raised a wall across the gate of their city, consisting of a stiff cement made of wax and propolis mixed in a certain proportion. This wall, sometimes carried directly across and sometimes a little behind the door, first completely closed up the entrance; but they pierced in it some openings just large enough to allow two bees to pass each other in their exits and entrances.

"The little engineers did not follow one invariable plan in these defensive works, but modified them according to circumstances. In some cases a single wall, having small wickets worked through it at certain points, was constructed. In others several walls were erected one within the other, placed parallel to each other, with trenches between them wide enough to allow two bees to pass each other. In each of these parallel walls several openings or wickets were pierced, but so placed as not to correspond in position, so that in entering a bee would have to follow a zigzag course in passing from wicket to wicket. In some cases these walls or curtains were wrought into a series of arcades, but so that the intervening columns of one corresponded to the arcades of the other.

"The bees never constructed these works of defence without urgent necessity. Thus, in seasons or in localities where the death's-head moth did not prevail, no such expedients were resorted to. Nor were they used against enemies which were open to attack by their sting. The bee, therefore, understands not merely the art of offensive war, and can play the part of the common soldier, but is also a consummate military engineer; and it is not against the death's-head moth alone that it shows itself capable of erecting such defences."

A correspondent of _The Times_, writing on naval guns, who signs himself "Z," alluded to my letters, and drew a happy illustration from them. Let me here inform the Admiralty of a new arm which in extremity--for otherwise it would be the sacrifice of too many bee combatants--may be used in naval warfare. But perhaps Lord Clarence Paget may find some difficulty in securing its adoption. It is related in "The Naturalist's Library:"--

"A small privateer with forty or fifty men, having on board some hives made of earthenware full of bees, was pursued by a Turkish galley manned by five hundred seamen and soldiers. As soon as the latter came alongside, the crew of the privateer mounted the rigging with their hives, and hurled them down on the deck of the galley. The Turks, astonished at this novel mode of warfare, and unable to defend themselves from the stings of the enraged bees, became so terrified that they thought of nothing but how to escape their fury; while the crew of the small vessel, defended by masks and gloves, flew upon their enemies sword in hand, and captured the vessel almost without resistance."

But as many of my recent correspondents in _The Times_ were clergymen, I can recommend to the ministers of Belfast an admirable prescription for the extreme case of a Belfast mob sacking their rectories and manses. The Mayor of Belfast also might take it into his grave consideration, should the citizens, instead of trying to convert each other by arguments or Scripture, have recourse to those fashionable weapons which they lately wielded with so much effect:--

"During the confusion occasioned by a time of war in 1525, a mob of peasants assembling in Hohnstein, in Thuringia, attempted to pillage the house of the parish minister, who, having in vain employed all his eloquence to dissuade them from their design, ordered his domestics to fetch his bee-hives and throw them in the middle of this furious mob. The effect was what might be expected; they were immediately put to flight, and happy to escape unstung."

Is not this worthy of the consideration of every peaceful vicar in Belfast?

The spider is also a very mischievous pest in bee-houses. He builds his web in nooks and corners, under the eaves and about the landing-boards, and in the track of the outgoing and incoming bees. When a bee is inveigled, its efforts to extricate its captive limbs serve only to involve it in the toils more hopelessly. I have seen half-a-dozen working-bees thus caught and scooped out by the ravenous jaws of the spider. These webs are constructed so rapidly, that nothing short of daily attention will get rid of them. The best thing is, to have the bee-house as smooth inside as it can be made, with as few projecting edges and points as possible; and in the next place, the daily use of a hard, dry painter's brush will sweep them away as fast as they are made, and probably their weavers with them.

Finally, the worst enemy of bees is man. There is the barbarous, cruel, and ungrateful treatment of the brimstone match. The little innocents have toiled all the summer. They have thrown off a swarm--after the example of the Church of Scotland, which, by way of showing its internal strength, threw off a capital swarm in 1843--they have recovered all the effects of their secession, and amassed abundance for future days. The bee-cide felon, called man, digs a pit, lights four ounces of brimstone inside of it, and deliberately sets fifteen thousand bees, queen and all, above its really and truly infernal fumes--suffocates and burns the unhappy martyrs, and then subscribes to various charities in winter, and calls himself a philanthropist! He ought to be sent to the treadmill. Why does the Society for Preventing Cruelty to Animals take up the case of cab-horses, and overlook the murdered bees? But there are regular inquisitors who do not use sulphur. Those scientific crinkum-crankum hives, from which bees with difficulty get out, and with more difficulty get in, are little purgatories, over which the inquisitors preside. Vivisection is no worse. Yet these men complain that all who advocate simple, easily accessible, and comfortable homes for bees are behind the age, and ignorant of apiarian progress! There are not more than three sorts of hives that are humane. All the others bewilder the brains, weary the legs, and spoil the tempers of the best bees that ever dwelt in a hive. I have no objection whatever to ornamental bee-sheds; but the hives which are the dwelling-places of my bees should be as plain as possible, comfortable, warm, and easy of exit and entrance. A very gifted preacher said it took all his learning to make his sermons plain: it ought to take all a bee-master's to make his hives simple. When I hear a fine preacher expressing himself in grand words and glittering figures, I always feel--I hope not uncharitably--that he cares more about displaying himself than serving his Master or feeding his flock. Even so I am tempted to think of the ingenious inventors of intricate labyrinths they intend for hives,--that their own fame as apiarians is their chief thought, and the comfort of their bees their last and least consideration. A careless, inattentive bee-master is criminal. He ought to see that his bees have a sufficiency of food at the close of the year. In fine October weather he may place several soup-plates filled with ale and sugar well boiled together, and covered with perforated wooden floats, which sink as the bees sip the contents, opposite his hives. I never find any quarrel ensue, though I have seen thousands of bees from different hives feed together for hours. After October till March no liquid food should be offered; but a stick of barley-sugar may be thrust in now and then. The bees will not descend to taste it in too cold weather, and during a warm day they will enjoy such a dessert. In case of damp within the hive, which, when a glass is retained, may be seen inside of it, select a warm day, remove the glass, and close the aperture in the hive. Wipe the interior of the glass with a linen cloth till perfectly dry, and replace it as before. But a little artificial ventilation on a dry, warm day is still better.

Do not let your bees find by painful experience that their bee-master is their worst enemy.

For an account of wasps, see my letter to _The Times_, page 157.

THE BEE-MASTER'S LETTERS TO "THE TIMES."

So many and so urgent have been the requests of my correspondents to reprint these letters, that I have carefully gone over them, corrected clerical errors, and reproduced them. They may amuse as well as teach. I append them in the order of their appearance. They were unfortunate enough to provoke the wrath of two or three hive-inventors or patentees, the merits of whose crooked and uncomfortable productions the writer could not appreciate; but they have received the warmest eulogies of great numbers to whom they conveyed new and interesting information.

It is a pity that petty jealousies should distill their poison on so pleasant a theme, and that bees should in this case turn wasps.

A very curious coincidence occurred in the course of the correspondence on bees which appeared in _The Times_. A succession of letters appeared in various more or less obscure newspapers, beginning at Exeter and moving northward to the Orkneys, each, _mutatis mutandis_, the repetition of the first. They invariably began by a laborious attempt to prove that the writer knows nothing of apiculture or prophecy, but in no one instance disproving a single position or showing the author's ignorance of apiculture, but in more than one instance deploring the writer's oversight of this or that hive. Every one of these writers--plainly under the inspiration of one--assumes that because the writer did not allude to his mode of treatment, he was ignorant of bee-management. The Bee-master had no idea there was such concert among bee-keepers, or that, in giving an account of his intercourse with his bees, he was putting his hands into hornets' nests. But wasps have been a terrible plague this autumn.

One writer in a Scotch paper, who gives bees no credit for any ordinary virtue, and regards them purely as mechanical toys, writes thus:--

"This Bee-master says that 'the bee leaves her house, traverses a mile or two distant, and returns to her home--one amid twenty contiguous ones--with unerring certainty.' This was the general opinion up till lately--that the bee always returned to its own hive--in fact, there was no means of proving the contrary until the introduction of the Ligurian variety of bee. For the information of 'A Bee-master,' I must tell him that they do not at all times go back to their own home, but make a mistake and enter their neighbour's. This fact I soon ascertained after I got the Ligurians, as in a short time I saw them going into all my other common hives, more or less, and a neighbour nearly a mile away from this found the Ligurians had joined one of his swarms when in the act of swarming. These are facts which cannot be controverted, and prove that 'A Bee-master' ought to make himself master of his subject before he attempts to teach others. Queens, too, are frequently killed by entering into other hives when placed near each other, through their mistaking the one for the other; but these facts were not known to the generality of bee-keepers until they used the bar hives, when all the economy of the interior could be examined at pleasure."

This foolish logician introduces foreigners to an English hive. They do not act like English bees--in short, they are not acquainted with a country in which they are not acclimatised; and from the blunders of the Ligurian foreigners he infers the ignorance of the British bee. This is a specimen of the rubbish printed from Devon to Haddington.

Another position of this Scotchman with a bee in his bonnet is as follows:--

"In removing a super--that is, a top or bonnet--he says they should be taken one hundred yards away from the hive, and the bees will fly back to the hive in about an hour. This I think a very bad plan. In the first place, if taken off in a fine day the bees would not leave it in an hour, and if there were any bees near, they would find it out in that time, their scent or sense of smell being so strong, and he would never get them away; and, besides, he would be very apt to take the queen away also, she being often found in the top, and she might not be able to fly back. It is certainly a bad plan in this part of the country, especially when the weather is cold in the autumn. When removing the heather honey, blow a few puffs of smoke from a burning rag into a super, and take it off, turning it upside down, putting on it another empty super of the same size, with cloth wrapped round where they meet, to keep out light. Next give the super containing the honey and the bees a few taps with a piece of stick at intervals. The bees, when filled with honey, which they will do as soon as disturbed, will ascend into the empty super, and if the queen should be there she will lead them at once, and they can all be put back into the hive. Any top can be emptied of bees in fifteen minutes by doing it in this way, and without running risk of losing the queen."

Now, in ninety-nine cases in a hundred the queen is not in the super, and an intelligent bee-master can take care she is not there before he removes the super; and, in the next place, _The Times_ Bee-master expressly stated his entire aversion to smoking bees for such a purpose; and earlier than August there is no risk of corsair bees. Besides, preference of one plan to another is not necessarily proof of ignorance.

This mere copyist of Devon remarks:--

"What can be the necessity for subjecting sugar to the temperature of 300 degrees, and rendering it so hard that weak hives are not able to take as much as keep them alive, when the same amount of sugar made to the consistency of their natural food would enable them to live? Common sense would indicate to anyone that in artificial feeding the nearer we approach their natural food the better; but it may be that it is hard honey which this wiseacre's bees gather for him, and that the flowers in Kent give different food than those in Scotland! Let anyone observe the time a bee takes to fill itself on barley-sugar and the time from sugar Syrup, and the labour spent on the former to that of the latter, and he will soon see the difference between the two. And the only reason the writer gave, in answer to a correspondent, for giving the barley-sugar is, 'that the other clogged the feet and smeared the wings of the bees.' Now, everyone must be aware that a few straws in the dish prevents this. Again, he says that 'the only vice among bees is their passionate liking for rum and strong ale; but the tee-totallers would fairly reply that they never care about either unless it is pressed upon them.' And I say they would reply truly, for I maintain that the bees will not touch either rum or ale unless they are saturated with sugar or honey. But why be at the expense of the one or the other, when they will take it made with pure water before either?"

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He must be in the habit of bolting his oatmeal pottage, or he never would have inferred that sipping its food in ten minutes is more conducive to the health and digestion of the bee than sipping it in half an hour. His remarks on ale and rum are merely a translation of the nonsense spoken by his original. But, in common with his co-partners in criticism, he thinks the Bee-master's sole design in writing the letters in _The Times_ was to puff his forthcoming work on bees. This mean and contemptible charge is best met by the simple and truthful answer, that the Bee-master had no more idea of writing a book on bees than of describing Mount Radnor or Yester Gardens. His purpose to do so arose from the urgent request of literally hundreds of correspondents.

On my suggestion as to the purpose and object of two thousand drones or male bees being produced, when there is only one perfect female--the queen--the writer observes:--

"In one of his letters in answer to correspondents, 'Why there are so many drones in a hive, and only one princess?' he confesses it a hard problem. But one part seems to him very clear--'When the queen's countless eggs come to be hatched, the temperature of the hive must be raised to 85° or 95°. The fat, round, and lazy drones are really the fuel. They accordingly give out great heat.' Had the writer really known anything about bees, he could never have made such a statement. If the drones are the fuel to keep up the heat, why is it that they are never found in the hives till May or June--in this part of the country, at least--after thousands of bees have been hatched? If they were the fuel, surely one would expect them to be the first eggs which were laid by the queen, according to his theory; but a queen will begin laying workers' eggs in January, and yet lay no drone eggs till May, just when the warm weather commences. Now, if they were required for heat, naturally Ave would expect them to be found before May, and they commence killing them in August, when the cold weather begins."

Now, the fact is, it is in May and June that drones are wanted to keep up the heat. Half the bees are out at work, the means of maintaining the temperature are therefore diminished. The drones remain at home, unless during the noonday heat, when they take an airing, and can best be spared.

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My first letter to _The Times_ was a report of the prospects of the honey harvest, as follows:--

I have ten stock-hives. I never destroy or kill my bees. I look on the system of the sulphur match as barbarous and unprofitable. I leave each family on an average not less than twenty-five pounds of honey for their winter stores, and the surplus only I take away. Should any hive swarm, which I can generally prevent, and the remaining stock be therefore deficient in provision for the winter, I feed them in the course of the early spring with barley-sugar. This and other little attentions endear the bee-master to his bees, as they are very susceptible of gratitude and have long memories.

A hive is very like a church: when, in May, it increases rapidly in numbers and the temperature rises inside, you either increase their accommodation in area or in height, or you will have a secession. Should a secession take place, bees set an example ecclesiastics might copy. The new church never falls out with the old one. Side by side they work in perfect harmony, believing there is plenty of food for both. The only incidental mischief-maker is the wasp; whether he be prelate or presbyter I cannot say, but I know well he is a thief and intruder, and after a fight, the bees, who in this matter are rigid non-intrusionists, eject, maim, or kill him--and he deserves it. Queen Victoria's Court is modelled on the apiarian queen's. You may see the queen-bee, by means of my glass windows, going her rounds and giving orders, with her royal ladies, who never turn their backs on her majesty. The exceptional instance occurred on one occasion when it became necessary to give a rather sickly establishment rum and sugar, of which they drank to excess and got drunk. As long as the stimulus lasted, the monarchy became a fierce democracy, and queen and subjects were confounded in the _mélée_.

The only vice among bees is their passionate liking for rum and strong ale. But the teetotaller would fairly reply, that they never care about either unless it is pressed upon them.

My bees at present have begun the massacre of the drones. These are a sort of Benedictine monks, who, like Brother Ignatius, prefer enjoyment to hard work. They are round, fat, and lazy, making much noise, and eating of stores to which they do not contribute.... But you want to hear about the harvest?

In one square box there are forty pounds of honey, and in a corresponding super rapidly filling up, there is likely to be for me as much more.

In three Scotch or Ayrshire octagonal hives, which I have found to answer best of any, the three supers are in two almost full; and in one there is at least forty pounds weight in the super, and over the super is a bell-glass with seven or eight pounds additional.

In one of Neighbours' very beautiful straw hives I have two bell-glasses almost full, and a month ago I removed from this hive a very beautiful glass of honey.

In one of Pettitt's lateral hives, the bees passed through the subterranean archway a month ago, and have nearly filled this compartment. On this, also, I have placed a super bell-glass, which is beautifully stored.

From a common cottage straw hive I removed a bell-glass super three weeks ago weighing eighteen pounds.

This season I shall have nearly two hundred pounds weight of surplus honey, and yet leave in each hive more than enough to last the producers till April, 1865. Why should not cottagers cultivate bees? There is nothing to pay for pasture, very little labour is required, and that labour amusing, in taking care of them, and for very early virgin honey there may be had one shilling and sixpence or two shillings and sixpence a pound. The poor cottager might thus easily pay his rent. If landlords could only convince them that the old system of burning the bees in order to get the stock honey--which is at best inferior--is not only cruel but unprofitable, they would do an essential service. The poor peasant would have an interesting amusement after his day's work, and a contribution towards his rent on the year's end.

* * * * *

Bees and Bee-hives.

_To the Editor of "The Times."_