The lore of the honey-bee

Contents

PAGE

Introduction

THE OLDEST CRAFT UNDER THE SUN - ix

CHAPTER

I. — THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE - I

II. — THE ISLE OF HONEY - - - 12

III. — BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE ACxES - 19

IV. — AT THE CITY GATES ' ' ~ ~ 34

V, — THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE - 46

VI. — EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY - - 58

VII. — THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 65

VIII. — THE BRIDE-WIDOW - - 80

IX. — THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 87

X. A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY - ICO

XI. — THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM - - 120

XII. — THE COMB-BUILDERS - - - - 1 34

XIII. — " WHERE THE BEE SUCKS " - - - 151

XIV. THE DRONE AND HIS STORY - - - l6l

XV. — AFTER THE FEAST - - - - - I J2

XVI. — THE MODERN BEE-FARM - - - I jS

XVII, — BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE - 1 85

vii

INTRODUCTION

THE OLDEST CRAFT UNDER THE SUN

/^NE of the oldest and prettiest fables in ancient ^^ mythology is that which deals with the origin of the honey-bee. It was to Melissa and her sister Amalthea, the beautiful daughters of the King of Crete, that the god Jupiter was entrusted by his mother Ops, when Saturn, his father — following his custom of devouring his children at birth — sought to make the usual meal of this, his latest offspring.

The story is variously rendered by ancient writers. Some say that bees already existed in the world, and that Amalthea was only a goat, whose milk served to nourish the baby-god, in addition to the honey that Melissa obtained from the wild bees in the cave where Jupiter lay hidden. Another account has it that the bees themselves were drawn to his place of concealment by the noise made by his nurses, who beat continually on brazen pans to keep the suund 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, x THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE

and that the propagation of the species took place by miraculous means. In explanation 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 herself 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 be a miraculous secretion from heaven — was confided 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 everything 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 established 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,

INTRODUCTION xi

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 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 thumbmarks 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 palaeolithic 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 required 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 the xii THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE

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 immeasurably earlier. The chances are that the world of trees and floweringplants, 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 development. It would be as unreasonable, therefore, not to infer that the honey-bee was ready on the earth with her store 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, 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 unlikely 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

INTRODUCTION xiii

civilisation must have been the gradual lessening 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 for beemanship in this category. The primaeval 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 primaeval 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, xiv THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE

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. Eolithic man may have had his own rocky fastness or clump of hollow trees, where the wild bees congregated ; and with the coming of each summer he may have followed his swarms through the glades of primaeval 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 undertaken 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 io,ooo years ago, Babylon probably still earlier, China that seems to have stopped at finite perfection 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-civilisation. 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 honey-bee or perish ? We have still probably a few thousand years wherein to think it out, and

INTRODUCTION xv

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 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, xvi THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE

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 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

INTRODUCTION xvii

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 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, these mysterious hive-people cause their queen-mother to give them either sons or daughters according to the needs xviii THE LORE OF THE HONEY-B£E

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 conflagration. 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 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 renunciation was made, for good or ill. And then

INTRODUCTION xix

tlie 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, reduced by the science of starvation to little more than sexless sinews and brains, they seem 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 point of the living sword. A pitiless logic overran 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.

Chapter I

" While great Csesar 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.

IT 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, Maecenas, the prime minister of Octavian, kept open house for all the great in literature and art.

Modern bee-keepers, athirst for the Amencanisation of everything, give little heed nowadays to the writings of one whom Bacon has called " the 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 influences, 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 incrustation of poetic fancy, and the fragrant mythological garniture, we cannot fail to see the true bee-lover writing directly out of his own knowledge, 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 generally 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-todate 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 inseparable, now as ever, from a craft which is probably 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 tendency 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 reconstruct 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 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, 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, 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 honey wort, 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-time bee-man of to-da^/ takes his mug of small-beer as a necessary rite, 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 mediaeval 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 " heavenborn 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 the hurtful nature of burnt crab-shells ; and tells us that in windy weather bees will carry about 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, widespread among the ancients, and shared by Virgil, that swarms of bees can be spontaneously generated 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 apiary. There is a very old translation of the passage in the fourth book of the Georgics relating to these self -generated bees, which is worth quoting, if only on account of its quaint mediaeval savour. " First, there is found a place, small and narrowed for the very use, shut in by a 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, and under his sides are put bitts of boughes, and thyme, and freshplucked 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 when the nimble Parthians make their first battle onset."