the form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet that
fills it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb in
both cases. The honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax he must
make himself--must evolve from his own inner consciousness. When wax
is to be made the wax-makers fill themselves with honey and retire into
their chamber for private meditation; it is like some solemn religious
rite; they take hold of hands, or hook themselves together in long lines
that hang in festoons from the top of the hive, and wait for the miracle
to transpire. After about twenty-four hours their patience is rewarded,
the honey is turned into wax, minute scales of which are secreted from
between the rings of the abdomen of each bee; this is taken off and from
it the comb is built up. It is calculated that about twenty-five pounds
of honey are used in elaborating one pound of comb, to say nothing of
the time that is lost. Hence the importance in an economical point of
view, of a recent device by which the honey is extracted and the comb
returned intact to the bees. But honey without the comb is the perfume
without the rose,--it is sweet merely, and soon degenerates into candy.
Half the delectableness is in breaking down these frail and exquisite
walls yourself, and tasting the nectar before it has lost its freshness
by the contact with the air. Then the comb is a sort of shield or foil
that prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed by the shock of the
sweet.
The drones have the least enviable time of it. Their foothold in the
hive is very precarious. They look like the giants, the lords of the
swarm, but they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening hum has
no sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the more
conspicuous marks for the birds.
Toward the close of the season, say in July or August, the fiat goes
forth that the drones must die; there is no further use for them. Then
the poor creatures, how they are huddled and hustled about, trying to
hide in corners and by-ways. There is no loud, defiant humming now, but
abject fear seizes them. They cower like hunted criminals. I have seen
a dozen or more of them wedge themselves into a small space between the
glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them or where
they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. They will also
crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. But sooner or later
they are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance, except
to pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his place)
with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and another
a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your waistbands
with his sting, the odds are greatly against you.
It is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made, not born. If the
entire population of Spain or Great Britain were the offspring of one
mother, it might be found necessary to hit upon some device by which a
royal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary one, or else give
up the fashion of royalty. All the bees in the hive have a common
parentage, and the queen and the worker are the same in the egg and in
the chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the
cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of
jelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no
eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee,
enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and
stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a
queen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young queen
is kept a prisoner in her cell till the old queen has left with the
swarm. Later on, the unhatched queen is guarded against the reigning
queen, who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal scion in the
hive. At this time both the queens, the one a prisoner and the other at
large, pipe defiance at each other, a shrill, fine, trumpet-like note
that any ear will at once recognize. This challenge, not being allowed
to be accepted by either party, is followed, in a day or two by the
abdication of the reigning queen; she leads out the swarm, and her
successor is liberated by her keepers, who, in her time, abdicates
in favor of the next younger. When the bees have decided that no more
swarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed to use her stiletto upon
her unhatched sisters. Cases have been known where two queens issued at
the same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged by the workers,
who formed a ring about them, but showed no preference, and recognized
the victor as the lawful sovereign. For these and many other curious
facts we are indebted to the blind Huber.
It is worthy of note that the position of the queen cells is always
vertical, while that of the drones and workers is horizontal; majesty
stands on its head, which fact may be a part of the secret.
The notion has always very generally prevailed that the queen of the
bees is an absolute ruler, and issues her royal orders to willing
subjects. Hence Napoleon the First sprinkled the symbolic bees over the
imperial mantle that bore the arms of his dynasty; and in the country
of the Pharaohs the bee was used as the emblem of a people sweetly
submissive to the orders of its king. But the fact is, a swarm of bees
is an absolute democracy, and kings and despots can find no warrant in
their example. The power and authority are entirely vested in the great
mass, the workers. They furnish all the brains and foresight of the
colony, and administer its affairs. Their word is law, and both king and
queen must obey. They regulate the swarming, and give the signal for the
swarm to issue from the hive; they select and make ready the tree in the
woods and conduct the queen to it.
The peculiar office and sacredness of the queen consists in the fact
that she is the mother of the swarm, and the bees love and cherish her
as a mother and not as a sovereign. She is the sole female bee in the
hive, and the swarm clings to her because she is their life. Deprived
of their queen, and of all brood from which to rear one, the swarm loses
all heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance of honey in the
hive.
The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is
to be disposed of they starve her to death; and the queen herself will
sting nothing but royalty--nothing but a rival queen.
The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her
to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is
a superb creature, and looks every inch a queen. It is an event to
distinguish her amid the mass of bees when the swarm alights; it awakens
a thrill. Before you have seen a queen you wonder if this or that bee,
which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she, but when you
once really set eyes upon her you do not doubt for a moment. You
know that is the queen. That long, elegant, shining, feminine-looking
creature can be none less than royalty. How beautifully her body tapers,
how distinguished she looks, how deliberate her movements! The bees
do not fall down before her, but caress her and touch her person.
The drones or males, are large bees too, but coarse, blunt,
broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. There is but one fact or incident
in the life of the queen that looks imperial and authoritative: Huber
relates that when the old queen is restrained in her movements by the
workers, and prevented from destroying the young queens in their cells,
she assumes a peculiar attitude and utters a note that strikes every bee
motionless, and makes every head bow; while this sound lasts not a bee
stirs, but all look abashed and humbled, yet whether the emotion is one
of fear, or reverence, or of sympathy with the distress of the queen
mother, is hard to determine. The moment it ceases and she advances
again toward the royal cells, the bees bite and pull and insult her as
before.
I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away from
home when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is; how
they come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees each
striving to get out first; it is as when the dam gives way and lets the
waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air,
and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye and a soft chorus
of myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they drift,
now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick about
some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other point,
till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few moments the
whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch perhaps as
large as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one to three or
four hours, or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked up, when, if
they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they are up and
off. In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen the enterprise
miscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small pear-tree into
a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath the tree, and put
the hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up into it, and all
seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I observed that
something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and to rush about
in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and all returned to
the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found beneath it the queen
with three or four other bees. She had been one of the first to fall,
had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it upon her. I conveyed
her tenderly back to the hive, but either the accident terminated
fatally with her or else the young queen had been liberated in the
interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it was ten days
before the swarm issued a second time.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the
woods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either
before or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees and
incapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to nature
and take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated.
Years upon years of life in the apiary seems to have no appreciable
effect towards their final, permanent domestication. That every new
swarm contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact
that they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such an
enterprise, and that a passing cloud or a sudden wind, after the bees
are in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive. Or
an attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose earth or water, will
quickly cause them to change their plans. I would not even say but
that, when the bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice, now
entirely discredited by regular bee-keepers but still resorted to by
unscientific folk, of beating upon tin pans, blowing horns, and creating
an uproar generally, might not be without good results. Certainly not by
drowning the "orders" of the queen, but by impressing the bees as
with some unusual commotion in nature. Bees are easily alarmed and
disconcerted, and I have known runaway swarms to be brought down by a
farmer ploughing in the field who showered them with handfuls of loose
soil.
I love to see a swarm go off--if it is not mine, and if mine must go I
want to be on hand to see the fun. It is a return to first principles
again by a very direct route. The past season I witnessed two such
escapes. One swarm had come out the day before, and, without alighting,
had returned to the parent hive--some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or may
be the queen had found her wings too weak. The next day they came out
again, and were hived. But something offended them, or else the tree in
the woods--perhaps some royal old maple or birch holding its head
high above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular chambers and
galleries--had too many attractions; for they were presently discovered
filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around.
Gradually they began to drift over the street; a moment more, and they
had become separated from the other bees, and, drawing together in a
more compact mass or cloud, away they went, a humming, flying vortex of
bees, the queen in the centre, and the swarm revolving around her as a
pivot,--over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight for the heart
of the mountain, about a mile distant,--slow at first, so that the youth
who gave chase kept up with them, but increasing their speed till only a
fox hound could have kept them in sight. I saw their pursuer laboring
up the side of the mountain; saw his white shirt-sleeves gleam as he
entered the woods; but he returned a few hours afterward without any
clew as to the particular tree in which they had taken refuge out of the
ten thousand that covered the side of the mountain.
The other swarm came out about one o'clock of a hot July day, and
at once showed symptoms that alarmed the keeper, who, however, threw
neither dirt nor water. The house was situated on a steep side-hill.
Behind it the ground rose, for a hundred rods or so, at an angle of
nearly forty-five degrees, and the prospect of having to chase them up
this hill, if chase them we should, promised a good trial of wind
at least; for it soon became evident that their course lay in this
direction. Determined to have a hand, or rather a foot, in the chase,
I threw off my coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairly
organized and under way. The route soon led me into a field of
standing rye, every spear of which held its head above my own. Plunging
recklessly forward, my course marked to those watching from below by the
agitated and wriggling grain, I emerged from the miniature forest just
in time to see the runaways disappearing over the top of the hill, some
fifty rods in advance of me. Lining them as well as I could, I soon
reached the hill-top, my breath utterly gone and the perspiration
streaming from every pore of my skin. On the other side the country
opened deep and wide. A large valley swept around to the north, heavily
wooded at its head and on its sides. It became evident at once that the
bees had made good their escape, and that whether they had stopped on
one side of the valley or the other, or had indeed cleared the opposite
mountain and gone into some unknown forest beyond, was entirely
problematical. I turned back, therefore, thinking of the honey-laden
tree that some of these forests would hold before the falling of the
leaf.
I heard of a youth in the neighborhood, more lucky than myself on a like
occasion. It seems that he had got well in advance of the swarm, whose
route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared the summit, hat
in hand, the bees had just come up and were all about him. Presently he
noticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alighting on his arm; and
in almost as brief a time as it takes to relate it, the whole swarm
had followed the queen into his hat. Being near a stone wall, he
coolly deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself from the
accommodating bees, and returned for a hive. The explanation of this
singular circumstance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to such long
and heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very exhaustion. It is
not very unusual for swarms to be thus found in remote fields, collected
upon a bush or branch of a tree.
When a swarm migrates to the woods in this manner, the individual bees,
as I have intimated, do not move in right lines or straight forward,
like a flock of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirlwind.
Unitedly they form a humming, revolving, nebulous mass, ten or fifteen
feet across, which keeps just high enough to clear all obstacles, except
in crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be very high. The
swarm seems to be guided by a line of couriers, which may be seen (at
least at the outset) constantly going and coming. As they take a direct
course, there is always some chance of following them to the tree,
unless they go a long distance, and some obstruction, like a wood, or
a swamp, or a high hill, intervenes--enough chance, at any rate, to
stimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase as long as their wind
holds out. If the bees are successfully followed to their retreat, two
plans are feasible: either to fell the tree at once, and seek to hive
them, perhaps bring them home in the section of the tree that contains
the cavity; or to leave the tree till fall, then invite your neighbors,
and go and cut it, and see the ground flow with honey. The former course
is more business-like; but the latter is the one usually recommended by
one's friends and neighbors.
Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms leave when no one
is about, and hence are unseen and unheard, save, perchance, by some
distant laborers in the field, or by some youth ploughing on the side
of the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, and sees the swarm
dimly whirling by overhead, and, may be, gives chase; or he may simply
catch the sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees nothing.
When he comes in at night he tells how he heard or saw a swarm of bees
go over; and, perhaps from beneath one of the hives in the garden a
black mass of bees has disappeared during the day.
They are not partial as to the kind of tree,--pine, hemlock, elm, birch,
maple, hickory,--any tree with a good cavity high up or low down. A
swarm of mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them, and took
up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree across an
adjoining field. The entrance was a mouse-hole near the ground.
Another swarm in the neighborhood deserted their keeper and went into
the cornice of an out-house that stood amid evergreens in the rear of
a large mansion. But there is no accounting for the taste of bees,
as Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the carcass, or more
probably the skeleton, of the lion he had slain.
In any given locality, especially in the more wooded and mountainous
districts, the number of swarms that thus assert their independence
forms quite a large per cent. In the Northern States these swarms very
often perish before spring; but in such a country as Florida they seem
to multiply, till bee-trees are very common. In the West, also, wild
honey is often gathered in large quantities. I noticed not long since,
that some wood-choppers on the west slope of the Coast Range felled a
tree that had several pailfuls in it.
One night on the Potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp near
the foot of a bee-tree, which next day the winds of heaven blew down,
for our special delectation, at least so we read the sign. Another time
while sitting by a waterfall in the leafless April woods I discovered
a swarm in the top of a large hickory. I had the season before remarked
the tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of leaves concealed
them from me. This time my former presentiment occurred to me, and,
looking sharply, sure enough there were the bees, going out and in a
large, irregular opening. In June a violent tempest of wind and rain
demolished the tree, and the honey was all lost in the creek into which
it fell. I happened along that way two or three days after the tornado,
when I saw a remnant of the swarm, those, doubtless, that escaped the
flood and those that were away when the disaster came, hanging in a
small black mass to a branch high up near where their home used to be.
They looked forlorn enough. If the queen was saved the remnant probably
sought another tree; otherwise the bees have soon died.
I have seen bees desert their hive in the spring when it was infested
with worms, or when the honey was exhausted; at such times the swarm
seems to wander aimlessly, alighting here and there, and perhaps in the
end uniting with some other colony. In case of such union, it would be
curious to know if negotiations were first opened between the parties,
and if the houseless bees are admitted at once to all the rights and
franchises of their benefactors. It would be very like the bees to have
some preliminary plan and understanding about the matter on both sides.
Bees will accommodate themselves to almost any quarters, yet no hive
seems to please them so well as a section of a hollow tree--"gums" as
they are called in the South and West where the sweet gum grows. In some
European countries the hive is always made from the trunk of a tree, a
suitable cavity being formed by boring. The old-fashioned straw hive is
picturesque, and a great favorite with the bees also.
The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign
of an army; the ranks are being continually depleted, and continually
recruited. What adventures they have by flood and field, and what
hair-breadth escapes! A strong swarm during the honey season loses, on
an average, about four or five thousand per month, or one hundred and
fifty per day. They are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by spiders,
benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, drowned in rivers and ponds, and
in many nameless ways cut off or disabled. In the spring the principal
mortality is from the cold. As the sun declines they get chilled before
they can reach home. Many fall down outside the hive, unable to get
in with their burden. One may see them come utterly spent and drop
hopelessly into the grass in front of their very doors. Before they can
rest the cold has stiffened them. I go out in April and May and pick
them up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm them
in the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth of my hand, until
they can crawl into the hive. Heat is their life, and an apparently
lifeless bee may be revived by warming him. I have also picked them up
while rowing on the river and seen them safely to shore. It is amusing
to see them come hurrying home when there is a thunderstorm approaching.
They come piling in till the rain is upon them. Those that are overtaken
by the storm doubtless weather it as best they can in the sheltering
trees or grass. It is not probable that a bee ever gets lost by
wandering into strange and unknown parts. With their myriad eyes they
see everything; and then, their sense of locality is very acute, is,
indeed, one of their ruling traits. When a bee marks the place of his
hive, or of a bit of good pasturage in the fields or swamps, or of the
bee-hunter's box of honey on the hills or in the woods, he returns to it
as unerringly as fate.
Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients than
it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the
modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of
youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in
the open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern
confectionery is poison beside it. Beside grape sugar, honey contains
manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions and
dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.
Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing
with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;
and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat
"bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out his
money," was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have
rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one day
inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and body so
long; to which the veteran replied that it was by "oil without and honey
within." Cicero, in his "Old Age," classes honey with meat and milk and
cheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept farm-house
will be supplied.
Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear to
have been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and
Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity, an
article doubtless in nowise superior to our best products. Leigh Hunt's
"Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and literature,
Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always been rich in
bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods on
this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many
hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the
island in this respect, and abound in bees--"Flat-nosed bees" as he
calls them in the Seventh Idyl--and comparisons in which comb-honey is
the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherds
can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with
honey-combs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis and fed on the
combs of bees; and among the delectables with which Arsinoe cherishes
Adonis are "honey-cakes," and other tid-bits made of "sweet honey." In
the country of Theocritus this custom is said still to prevail: when a
couple are married the attendants place honey in their mouths, by which
they would symbolize the hope that their love may be as sweet to their
souls as honey to the palate.