So many and so urgent have been the requests of my correspondents to
reprint these letters, that I have carefully gone over them, corrected
clerical errors, and reproduced them. They may amuse as well as teach. I
append them in the order of their appearance. They were unfortunate enough
to provoke the wrath of two or three hive-inventors or patentees, the
merits of whose crooked and uncomfortable productions the writer could not
appreciate; but they have received the warmest eulogies of great numbers
to whom they conveyed new and interesting information.
It is a pity that petty jealousies should distill their poison on so
pleasant a theme, and that bees should in this case turn wasps.
A very curious coincidence occurred in the course of the correspondence
on bees which appeared in _The Times_. A succession of letters appeared
in various more or less obscure newspapers, beginning at Exeter and
moving northward to the Orkneys, each, _mutatis mutandis_, the repetition
of the first. They invariably began by a laborious attempt to prove
that the writer knows nothing of apiculture or prophecy, but in no one
instance disproving a single position or showing the author's ignorance
of apiculture, but in more than one instance deploring the writer's
oversight of this or that hive. Every one of these writers--plainly under
the inspiration of one--assumes that because the writer did not allude to
his mode of treatment, he was ignorant of bee-management. The Bee-master
had no idea there was such concert among bee-keepers, or that, in giving
an account of his intercourse with his bees, he was putting his hands into
hornets' nests. But wasps have been a terrible plague this autumn.
One writer in a Scotch paper, who gives bees no credit for any ordinary
virtue, and regards them purely as mechanical toys, writes thus:--
"This Bee-master says that 'the bee leaves her house, traverses a mile
or two distant, and returns to her home--one amid twenty contiguous
ones--with unerring certainty.' This was the general opinion up till
lately--that the bee always returned to its own hive--in fact, there
was no means of proving the contrary until the introduction of the
Ligurian variety of bee. For the information of 'A Bee-master,' I must
tell him that they do not at all times go back to their own home,
but make a mistake and enter their neighbour's. This fact I soon
ascertained after I got the Ligurians, as in a short time I saw them
going into all my other common hives, more or less, and a neighbour
nearly a mile away from this found the Ligurians had joined one of
his swarms when in the act of swarming. These are facts which cannot
be controverted, and prove that 'A Bee-master' ought to make himself
master of his subject before he attempts to teach others. Queens, too,
are frequently killed by entering into other hives when placed near
each other, through their mistaking the one for the other; but these
facts were not known to the generality of bee-keepers until they used
the bar hives, when all the economy of the interior could be examined
at pleasure."
This foolish logician introduces foreigners to an English hive. They
do not act like English bees--in short, they are not acquainted with a
country in which they are not acclimatised; and from the blunders of the
Ligurian foreigners he infers the ignorance of the British bee. This is a
specimen of the rubbish printed from Devon to Haddington.
Another position of this Scotchman with a bee in his bonnet is as
follows:--
"In removing a super--that is, a top or bonnet--he says they should
be taken one hundred yards away from the hive, and the bees will fly
back to the hive in about an hour. This I think a very bad plan. In
the first place, if taken off in a fine day the bees would not leave
it in an hour, and if there were any bees near, they would find it out
in that time, their scent or sense of smell being so strong, and he
would never get them away; and, besides, he would be very apt to take
the queen away also, she being often found in the top, and she might
not be able to fly back. It is certainly a bad plan in this part of
the country, especially when the weather is cold in the autumn. When
removing the heather honey, blow a few puffs of smoke from a burning
rag into a super, and take it off, turning it upside down, putting
on it another empty super of the same size, with cloth wrapped round
where they meet, to keep out light. Next give the super containing the
honey and the bees a few taps with a piece of stick at intervals. The
bees, when filled with honey, which they will do as soon as disturbed,
will ascend into the empty super, and if the queen should be there she
will lead them at once, and they can all be put back into the hive.
Any top can be emptied of bees in fifteen minutes by doing it in this
way, and without running risk of losing the queen."
Now, in ninety-nine cases in a hundred the queen is not in the super, and
an intelligent bee-master can take care she is not there before he removes
the super; and, in the next place, _The Times_ Bee-master expressly stated
his entire aversion to smoking bees for such a purpose; and earlier than
August there is no risk of corsair bees. Besides, preference of one plan
to another is not necessarily proof of ignorance.