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.
[Picture: Hiving a swarm]
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.