Part 11

In some of the letters you have been good enough to send me, the expense of these hives is urged as a fatal objection as far as the cottager is concerned. Let me therefore explain my last and cheapest plan--not best, but cheapest.

Place the swarm in a common shilling straw hive. When you ascertain, either by its weight or the busy working of the bees, that it is full, take a square board, about a foot square; cut in the centre of it a round hole three or four inches in diameter; place on it a bell-glass, or what is cheaper, a smaller straw hive. Take a sharp table-knife, and go to the hive about twelve o'clock at noon, when most of the bees are out working; cut out the top of the straw hive, making a round aperture of four or five inches in diameter, and place on it the board with the bell-glass, or lesser straw super, covering the glass with its nightcap, and you have everything you can desire. If, in cutting the hole on the top of the stock hive, you hesitate or lose your self-possession, the watcher bees will attack you. Decision invariably paralyses them for the moment, and secures your safety. These glasses or supers are removed by cutting through between the board and the lower edge of the super with a zinc plate, on which you carry off the super full of surplus honey, placing over the hole at the top of the stock a flat board or an empty super. From one straw hive treated in this way I carried off eighteen pounds of honey at the beginning of July this year. I ought to add, that I keep my hives of every sort under cover of wooden sheds, accessible from behind by means of doors that let down. During the winter, I cover up the hives in the sheds each with paper, and thereby I keep them warm. As the spring approaches, I give the lightest an occasional half-pound of barley-sugar. This barley-sugar I get at Kilner's, in Hanway-street, Oxford-street, before it is mixed with scent or lemon-acid. Common sugar is of no use. To be available to the bee, to suit a lambent insect, it must have been exposed to a heat of 300° Fahrenheit, in order to reduce crystallisable to uncrystallisable sugar. As I am answering your and my correspondents, I had better add a few useful hints.

Get acquainted with your bees; they are naturally very affectionate. I have frequently hived swarms, filling each hand with clusters of bees, and rarely have I received a sting. I have sat in the midst of them for hours, and weary bees have rested on me, and have entered their homes singing a song of thanks.

They have several bitter enemies besides the wasp. I used to see toads frequently sitting under the landing-board, and only recently discovered they were there "seeking whom they could devour." On one of these ugly visitors being laid open, his maw was found filled with bees which he had sucked into his ugly jaws. The tom-tit, also, is a dangerous little enemy. He perches on the landing-place of the bees on a wet day, taps with his bill, apparently inquiring after the health of the inmates; a watcher bee comes out to reconnoitre, and is instantly snapped up by the wicked hypocrite. The spider, also, catches weary bees in his web; but the occasional use of a brush disposes of this peril. The snail, attracted by the warmth, occasionally creeps in. The bees successively attack him, but find their stings blunted and broken by the shell, as shot is by our iron-sides. Failing to injure or remove the intruder, they have recourse to a plan which indicates more than instinct They cover him up with propolis, a kind of gum which they use for stopping up crevices; and not only does he die from want of air, but he is prevented from giving forth offensive odour by the air-tight case or shroud.

The most attentive bee-master occasionally gets stung. I have discovered a cure not found in the pharmacopœia. Press a watch-key hard on the place after removing the sting--this prevents the poison from spreading; then apply moist snuff or tobacco, rubbing it well in, and in five minutes all pain is gone. This is a never-failing remedy.

I have entered into these details, because from the correspondence you have sent me, and from letters that have reached me, it is evident that a great interest has been excited by my communication, and because it is of great social importance. Many a poor curate and ill-paid vicar, and many a cottager with time to spare and his rent to pay, may thus add to their income. My bees feed over an area of six miles, improving every flower they touch, and robbing nobody. Tunbridge Wells is one of the best bee-districts in England, and this alone is evidence of its being a healthy district. Bees never get on in unhealthy places.

Apologising for this long communication, I am, &c.,

A Bee-master.

Tunbridge Wells, July 27.

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Bees and Bee-hives,

To the Editor of "The Times!"

Sir,--The letters that reach me addressed to "The Times Bee-master" are legion. I can now form some idea of the weight of the load that must press on your shoulders every day; but I confess I had no notion of the extent of the interest that these letters prove to exist in apiarian culture. I select such difficulties from the letters before me as I have not disposed of, and these I would endeavour to overcome.

A very often repeated question is--What is the best way of hiving bees or securing a swarm? Let me at once state that the old and inveterate habit in Kent of beating a kettle, striking the tongs with the poker, and raising similar discordant sounds, is utterly absurd. They do not affect the bees. In swarming, the old queen abdicates and heads the swarm, and a young queen mounts the throne in the hive. The outgoing queen, followed by five thousand or six thousand bees, either ex proprio motu, or guided by pioneer scouts, selects a rose-bush, or a cozy opening in a laurel-hedge, and all her subjects hang on, forming a cluster of bees as large as the largest bunch of grapes. As soon as they have nearly all settled, take your empty hive or bee-box, which must be thoroughly dean, as bees hate dirt and slovenliness; turn the hive or box bottom upwards, hold it in your left hand under the cluster of bees, lay hold of the branch on which the bees hang with your right hand, and shake down the swarm into your empty hive. Place the hive bottom downward on a bee-board laid on the grass close by, raise up the edge by inserting a wedge or stone about two inches in size, and cover the top of the hive with a cloth or a few branches to keep off the sun heat. If the queen is inside, which is usually the case, the bees will steadily enter and remain. If by your awkwardness you have left her in the hedge with her ladies-in-waiting, the bees will return to the hedge, and you will have all to begin anew. As soon as they are comfortably housed, carry the hive to the shed under which it is to stand, and do not look at it or touch it for three days.

You need not be afraid of stings unless you rudely and violently meddle with the queen. If you thus interfere with her, the watcher bees will sound the alarm, and a thousand stings, like swords, will be unsheathed; but, otherwise, they are so absorbed with her majesty that they do not fly at a prudent and fearless bee-master.

A very important inquiry, repeated in several letters, is, on removing the super, whether of glass or straw, how are the bees to be expelled, that the honey alone may thus be secured?

All the plans of tapping, beating, and smoking are bad. Tobacco-smoke, and smokers generally, bees have a mortal hatred to. Bees have other personal antipathies, but the horrid scent of a tobacco-pipe in a visitor's pocket either induces them disdainfully to shun all acquaintance, or provokes them to make an attack.

Your best way of removing a super full of honey, with bees, of course, in the spaces not full of comb, is to carry it about one hundred yards away from the hive. Wedge up the glass on one side from the zinc plate on which you have carried it, and the bees will leave in the course of an hour or two, and fly home. They very soon discover their separation from their queen, and under this feeling they lose all courage, and give up defending the very property they would have died fighting for when connected with the parent hive. The exceptional case is where there may be, what is very rare in a super, a portion of young brood--always in such cases drone-brood. This they refuse to desert. They do not attack, but, as if placed sentries by their queen, they insist on continuing at their post. The only course in such a case is to cut out the brood cells and put them away, as they are not likely to be wanted, and the bees will then return to the stock hive, report, I suppose, and receive future orders. In removing a super in August, when the bee ceases to accumulate in Kent, you must take care not to do so on the windward side of your hives, as the scent of honey will bring your visitors from every hive, who will rob you of all.

If in this month you find it difficult to escape the robbers, carry your super into your cottage, near a window, and expose one side of the super to the window--the side having egress for the bees. Very soon great numbers will fly to the window-panes, and by opening it for a few minutes they will rush out, and robber bees will have no time to enter.

I have been asked--Who and what is the queen, and who are those lazy abbots I referred to as drones? The queen is nearly twice the length of the common bee, of elegant proportions and shape. On seeing her, you would at once pronounce her a duchess or a queen. But it is a singular fact, and well worthy the consideration of sanitary students, that she rises originally from the ranks, and that treatment makes all the difference. The egg deposited seems the same as that of the ordinary bee, but we find it always laid in a cell three times the size of common cells. As soon as the young queen comes from the egg, numbers of nurse bees wait on her; she receives finer and more delicate food, more air, a warmer, larger, and nicer house, and apparently she is the creation of circumstances. She is the only female bee. The working-bees are neuters, really imperfectly developed females; the queen's husband is a drone. With queenly prerogative and dignity she selects her consort, and off they fly on a wedding-trip, and spend the honeymoon amid sunshine and flowers. But it is asked--Why are there so many drones in a hive, if there is only one wife? This is a very hard problem. But one part of it seems to me very clear. When the Queen's countless eggs come to be hatched, the temperature of the hive must be raised to 85° or 90° Fahrenheit. The bees must go out of doors to work. The fat, round, and lazy drones are really the fuel. They accordingly give out heat when most wanted. Mr. Cotton holds this view also. This year I had two stock-hives during breeding that stood, from 10 to 4 o'clock, at 95° Fahrenheit. We thus learn that fat old gentlemen are of use, and that Mr. Banting's system is not always wise or expedient. There are in a good hive three or four royal cells; consequently, three or four queens will turn up. What follows? If the heat be great and additional room withheld, the old queen will abdicate and head a secession--in apiarian language, a swarm--and the next senior queen will ascend the throne. If there be still no increase of room allowed, she, too, will secede and head a second secession--in apiarian phrase, a caste--usually feeble, requiring when hived to be fed, and rarely a desirable issue. But when increased space is given, and a drawing-room is added to the dining-room, and boudoirs to the nursery, I am asked what follows. Do the princesses live together in harmony? My answer, from very careful observation, reveals a sad fact--a fact I cannot suppose to have been instituted in Paradise. If two queens turn up in a hive with plenty of space, but related space, they fight it out till one alone lives. So settled is this law, that the bees hound on the more timid and cowardly of the two queens, and insist on victory with supremacy or death. This is to me a very melancholy trait in a favourite study; but I suppose some higher law requires it.

It has been urged as a commercial question that honey is not now of the same importance as it was before the sugar-cane was discovered, and that gas has superseded wax candles. I am satisfied from many considerations, that if people would eat honey at breakfast instead of rancid London butter and nasty greasy bacon, not only would their health be better, but their temper would be sweeter. I find invariably that people who like honey are persons of genial and affectionate temper. If Mr. Cobden and Mr. Roebuck had only taken honey at breakfast, or a very choice fragment of virgin honey at dessert, they would never have given utterance to those vinegar and acetic-acid speeches which did them no credit. I wish somebody would send Mr. Spurgeon a super of good honey. Three months' diet on this celestial food would induce him to give up those shockingly bitter and unchristian tirades he has been lately making against the clergy of the Church of England. The producers of honey never draw their stings unless in defence of their homesteads, and the eaters and admirers of honey rarely indulge in acrimonious language. I believe a great deal of bad feeling is not moral or mental, but physical, in its origin. If you have in a congregation, or in a school, or in a convocation, some one who sets everybody by the ears, treat him to a little honey at breakfast for six months, and the "thorn will blossom as the rose." People that can't eat honey--"hunc tu caveto"--they can't ever fit "a land overflowing with milk and honey."

I have not answered half the letters I have received; but because you have been so good as to take an interest in this very interesting subject, I intend to send you, as an expression of my thanks, a small glass super of honey filled from heath during July. If you do not eat honey, which I hope and, indeed, am sure is not the fact, you can give a portion to any inmates of your great hive in Printing-house-square who may be prone to use their stings too freely.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

A Bee-master.

Tunbridge Wells, August 2.

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The origin of the following letter was a very foolish letter which a correspondent sent to The Times. His cannot be the deliberate conviction of anyone acquainted with bees. Perhaps he was offended that no notice was taken of a very unsatisfactory hive patented by him. But as I could not praise, I thought it unnecessary to blame.

A Hornet Among the Bees.