CHAPTER XVI. The Modern Bee-Farm

THE MODERN BEE-FARM

IT is well enough to consider the scientific side of hive-life for its intrinsic interest, to treat it for what it really is—one of the most absorbing studies available for leisure hours. But the honey-bee is something more than a wonder-maker, or a peg on which to hang dilettante moralisms. Rightly treated and exactly understood, she can be made of great use in the world.

There are two things in this England of ours which profoundly astonish all who love bees, and have a true conception of their possibilities. Travel where you may in the land, the last thing you are likely to meet with is a bee-farm, or even a few hives in a cottage-garden; while every yard of your way has its nook of blossom, and every mile its stretch of flowery pasture, where, in sober truth, tons of honey are annually running to waste. All this could be garnered and sold to the people at little trouble and great profit, if only enterprise would wake up from its island-lethargy and stretch forth the hand. But the years dribble uselessly by, and nothing is done. Here and there a wide-awake husbandman gets a little township of hives together, sells in the neighbourhood all the honey his bees make, and puts to his pocket a gold and silver lining. But this is only a drop in the ocean, and the British people must send abroad for their honey, which they do to the pretty tune of more than £30,000 a year.

Hitherto, reasoning backward from effect to cause, it would seem that farming has been remunerative only when undertaken on a large scale; but those who can read the signs of the times tell us that the age, just dawning to the country-side, will be the age of the small man. And this must mean that the hereditary aristocracy among crops—wheat, oats, barley—will slowly give place to little-culture: in a word, that the land will be made to produce, not the things that tradition and our yeoman family pride have ordained as the be-all and end-all of farming, but the minor, humble necessities for which each town and village should look to the good brown earth immediately about it, but at present looks in vain. Farmers’ ladies may then no longer sit in their drawing-rooms and ride in their carriages, but that will be a change for the simpler, more proportionate. Those who live in towns have little conception of it; but the country-dweller knows well what complexity and luxury have got into the old English farmhouses, for all the outcry about hard times; how the farmer’s wife no longer goes to her dairy, nor makes any of the good old farmhouse things that served to uphold country England in days gone by; and how the master-agriculturists now are the sinews of the great London Stores, while the little local shopkeepers are left to the field-labourer with his twelve or fifteen shillings a week.

For the class of small-holders that must now multiply throughout the length and breadth of the land, there is awaiting an enterprise—a source of livelihood—as yet hardly tapped. A stock subject of envy with most artisans is the capitalist who leads an easy life while his factory hands toil for him. But if the small-holder will take up bee-keeping, he too can look on, to a large extent, while his thousands of winged labourers are filling his storehouse with some of the most useful and saleable merchandise in the world. It is a truism in commerce that a good supply creates a demand just as certainly as that the universal want of a thing stimulates its production. One of the needs in England to-day is a full, good, and cheap supply of honey; and when this is forthcoming there will be little fear but that the present demand will increase hand over hand.

There are many reasons why the people should choose honey for their principal food rather than the beet sugar which is now so largely consumed. In the first place, honey is a pure, natural, undoctored sweet, while in the manufacture of ordinary sugar the use of more or less noxious chemicals seems to be indispensable. When a stock of bees must be artificially fed, and common grocers’ sugar is used for the purpose, the result is generally that half the stock is poisoned by the chemicals with which the sugar has been treated at the mill. And if this is its effect on bees, the inference must be that it cannot prove altogether wholesome for men. But its purity is not the chief reason why honey should be the universal sweet-food of the people. Honey is the ordinary sugar of nectar concentrated and converted into what is chemically known as grape-sugar; and thus, in ripe honey, the first and most important part of digestion is already effected before it leaves the comb. This explains why so many delicate people, and particularly children, can assimilate food sweetened with honey, when they can take no other form of sweet.

Doctors are continually finding some new virtue in honey. Its gently regulating action has been long known, and there is good authority for stating that there is not an organ in the human body which does not benefit from its habitual use. In all wasting diseases, and triumphantly in consumption, it will prevail as an up-builder when everything else fails. There is no doubt at all that cases of consumption have been entirely cured by a liberal diet of honey; and, notoriously, honey is the main ingredient in nearly all patent medicines for diseases of the chest and throat. Therapeutic hints from laymen are generally looked upon askance by medical men—at least, by those of the old-fashioned type; yet, on the chance that this page may come under the eye of some of the more elastic-minded, the thing may be hazarded. There are many who believe in it, and with good reason, as a sovereign specific where the disease is a wasting one. It is nothing else than the once famous Athole Brose, which, as all Scottish bee-keepers know, consist of equal parts of good thick honey, preferably from ling-heather, and of cream, and of mature Scotch whisky from the pot-still. Little and often is the rule for its administration, but, unlike most old wife’s remedies, faith has nothing to do with its wonder-working. Scepticism is a soil in which it seems to flourish as well as any.

The man of business, resolved to take up bee-keeping as a livelihood, must, at the outset, decide on what scale he will carry the matter through. There are two aspects of the thing, each more alluring than the other, according to the temperament and point of view. There is the Simple Life and the bee-garden—a life spent in the green quiet of an English village, within reach of a market town, where the produce of the hives may be disposed of. And there is the greater enterprise, the foundation of a bee-farm on an extensive scale, and on the most approved scientific principles, where the object is to supply the great central markets at a distance rather than the immediate local needs.

In the establishment of a bee-farm the first care must be the choice of a suitable district. The nature of the surrounding country must largely govern the systems on which the farm can be most profitably worked. The first maxim in successful beemanship is to get all hives filled to the brim with worker-bees by the time the great honey-flow sets in. This time, however, varies according to the district. In the orchard-country we need bees early; in heather-districts we want them late. In south-west England, where the country is half fruit-ground and half moorland, the hives must be huge in population both late and early. But where the bee-keeper follows the sheep-farmer—and there is no better guide to honey than the sheep—his true policy is to work his colonies slowly and steadily up to their greatest strength by the time the main feed-crops come into blossom, which is seldom before the middle of May. And all these considerations land us on the brink of a very vexed question in modern bee-craft—whether bees should be artificially fed, and if so, how and when?

If only the purest cane-sugar is used, and the syrup well boiled and never burnt, there is nothing to say against the practice on the score of harm to the stocks. Where early bees are wanted, it is absolutely necessary to give them a continuous supply of sugar-syrup from the first moment that breeding commences in the hives. Chemically, the sweet constituent in nectar is almost identical with that from the sugar-cane; and sugar-syrup has this advantage over honey given—that it more nearly simulates the natural flow. The bees responsible for the nursery-work in the hive and the regulation of the queen’s fecundity, are young bees that have never yet flown. They can, therefore, only judge of the progress of the season by the amount of nectar and pollen coming into the hive. Where this is steadily increasing day by day—and it is this regular natural progress in prosperity which the bee-keeper must strive to imitate in artificial feeding—the nurse-bees gain confidence, and brood-raising forges rapidly ahead.

But sugar-syrup and pea-flour are not natural foods for bees, and there is little doubt that a prolonged course of such diet tends to lower the tone and stamina of the race, and thus may prepare the way for disease. The golden rule in the matter seems to be that artificial feeding should be resorted to only where strength of stocks is necessary, to secure the harvest, or where actual starvation threatens. In purely heather-districts, when the big population is quite early enough if it is to hand in late June, nothing short of imminent starvation should induce the bee-master to give artificial, and therefore unavoidably inferior, food. In sheep-country the same rule holds. Except in the most unfavourable years, a hive, headed by a young and vigorous queen, can be relied upon to get itself into the finest fettle by the time the main crops are ready for exploitation. In this case the beeman has only to make certain from time to time that no stock is in absolute want of the ordinary means of subsistence.

But in those warm, favoured regions of the south-west, the lands of the apple-blossom and the heather, where there is a very early and a very late harvest to be gathered, a different system must be pursued. Here we touch on the second grand principle of successful bee-keeping—the necessity for having in all hives only the most prolific mother-bees. For profitable honey-getting a queen should seldom be kept beyond her second year. After that she is usually of little account, and should be superseded, either by the bee-master or the bees. But where a queen has been over-stimulated by feeding to raise an immense population in the spring of the year, she is rarely capable of another supreme effort in the autumn. The best policy, therefore, if the heather-harvest is an important one, is to remove the old queens as soon as the spring work is over, and to substitute for them queens that are in their best season, but at the beginning of their resources instead of at the end. In this way another huge army of workers is soon born to the hive, and the double harvest is secured.

On the question of the best hive to use in commercial bee-keeping, on either a large or small scale, it is hard to particularise. Generalisation, however, is not difficult here. Every bee-master has his own ideas as to details, but all are happily agreed on the main constructive principles. Experience has fairly well decided that a good queen, under the modern system of intensive culture, will require for her brood a comb-surface of about 1,800 square inches. A brood-nest of smaller capacity than this is liable to cramp her operations at their highest, and anything in excess of it will simply mean so much new honey lost to the super-chambers, where alone the bee-master requires it. Honey stored in the brood-nest, except during the off-season, is loss instead of gain. The best hive, therefore, will contain just as many brood-combs in movable frames as will ensure the right capacity; and all comb-frames throughout the bee-farm must be of the same size, so that they will be strictly interchangeable among the various hives. This is a vital point in successful bee-culture, because it enables the master not only to equalise the strength of his stocks by transferring combs of hatching brood from one to the other; but he can also give to penurious stocks frames of sealed honey from the abundance of their neighbours, and he can unite the weak colonies, thus rendering all strong.

For the rest, the hives must be so made that heat will be perfectly retained in the cold season, and as perfectly excluded during the sultriest time of year. Double walls round the brood-chamber are a necessity in the changeable British climate, where chilly days are always probable during ten months out of the twelve.

As well as honey-production, the bee-farmer will find an equal source of profit in the production of wax. Just as there is nothing like leather, beeswax holds its own as a marketable commodity in spite of paraffin substitutes. But if it is almost universally degraded by adulteration, the fault lies with the beemen, who have never seriously attempted to meet the demand for it. Wax-production on a large scale is perfectly feasible, and there is little doubt that it could be developed into an important British industry, as it used to be in mediæval days. Yet these are times of revolution: the honey-bee may yet find herself entirely restored to her old national avocation—of bringing light to our darkness, and to our bodies one of the best and purest of foods.