CHAPTER III. Bee-Masters in the Middle Ages

BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

STUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee are generally struck with two very remarkable characteristics about them—their invariable 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 completely 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 litterati, and that it would be the rankest heresy to advance any new truth, garnered from their individual experience, unless it could be supported by ample testimony from the same infallible source.

They seemed to look upon the works of Aristotle, 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, however, 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 uncorrupted a faith which seems so readily, and at so many points, assailable. But it must be remembered 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 working of the bees could be seen. But nothing of the kind seems to have been attempted among English bee-masters until the seventeenth century. Moreover, 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 disturbing the bees—that any real progress in bee-knowledge was made. The modern observation-hive, wherein the bees are compelled to build their 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 impossibility 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 principle, 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 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 kingship, and one, moreover, which would especially appeal to the ignorant and superstitious masses. No doubt, however, in taking up this position, 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 absolute 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 mediæval 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 Masculine 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 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 antennæ of the foraging bees, giving much the same appearance of a plume, or tassel, as Butler saw in his day.

He gives some advice as to the deportment of a good bee-master which is well worth quoting. “If 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 uncleanely: for impurity and sluttishnesse (themselves 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 noisomenesse 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. In a 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 mediæval times vied with each other in their testimony to the 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 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 one stolen. 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 medieval bee-masters were always quaintly explicit. 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 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 come 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 “ringing the bees” is undoubtedly of Roman origin; but whether it was introduced by Cæsar’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 mediæval times, when bee-gardens were much 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, dishonest claims to its possession were largely prevented, or, at least, discouraged.

The question whether the noise made by ringing 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 apiculturists 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 indiscriminately 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 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 whomsoever 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 superstition in mediæval 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 particularly offensive to bees, and one is warned not 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 overlooking 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 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 seventeenth 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. 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 therefore 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 beemen with a taste for the quack-doctor’s art that 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 reduced 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 compounded 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 mediæval times. It seems to have been nothing more than a mixture of honey, water, and vinegar; but it was accredited with extraordinary virtues. It was an infallible cure for sciatica, gout, and kindred ailments; 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 for stiff joints and aching muscles. The supposed curative value of beeswax in its natural state, however, was as nothing compared to its capabilities 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 distilled 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.”

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 pinnacle of the marvellous. After a learned dissertation 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 nowadays 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 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 great extent. 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 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 generation. 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 was a matter of arithmetic. 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 destruction tended to preserve only those strains of bees who were inveterate swarmers; while the steady, industrious stay-at-homes, who accumulated the largest stores of honey, were invariably exterminated. This is a fateful legacy to have passed on, when we consider that one of 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.