HEREDITY IN THE BEE-GARDEN
WE were in the great high-road of Warrilow bee-farm, and had stopped
midway down in the heart of the waxen city. On every hand the hives
stretched away in long trim rows, and the hot June sunshine was alive
with darting bees and fragrant with the smell of new-made honey.
“Swarming?” said the bee-master, in answer to a question I had put to
him. “We never allow swarming here. My bees have to work for me, and
not for themselves; so we have discarded that old-fashioned notion long
ago.”
He brought his honey-barrow to a halt, and sat down ruminatively on the
handle.
“Swarming,” he went on to explain, “is the great trouble in modern
bee-keeping. It is a bad legacy left us by the old-time skeppists. With
the ancient straw hives and the old benighted methods of working, it was
all very well. When bee-burning was the custom, and all the heaviest
hives were foredoomed to the sulphur-pit, the best bees were those that
gave the earliest and the largest swarms. The more stocks there were in
the garden the more honey there would be for market. Swarming was
encouraged in every possible way. And so, at last, the steady,
stay-at-home variety of honey-bee became exterminated, and only the
inveterate swarmers were kept to carry on the strain.”
I quoted the time-honoured maxim about a swarm in May being worth a load
of hay. The bee-master laughed derisively.
“To the modern bee-keeper,” he said, “a swarm in May is little short of a
disgrace. There is no clearer sign of bad beemanship nowadays than when
a strong colony is allowed to weaken itself by swarming on the eve of the
great honey-flow, just when strength and numbers are most needed. Of
course, in the old days, the maxim held true enough. The straw skeps had
room only for a certain number of bees, and when they became too crowded
there was nothing for it but to let the colonies split up in the natural
way. But the modern frame-hive, with its extending brood-chamber, does
away with that necessity. Instead of the old beggarly ten or twelve
thousand, we can now raise a population of forty or fifty thousand bees
in each hive, and so treble and quadruple the honey-harvest.”
“But,” I asked him, “do not the bees go on swarming all the same, if you
let them?”
“The old instincts die hard,” he said. “Some day they will learn more
scientific ways; but as yet they have not realised the change that modern
bee-keeping has made in their condition. Of course, swarming has its
clear, definite purpose, apart from that of relieving the congestion of
the stock. When a hive swarms, the old queen goes off with the flying
squadron, and a new one takes her place at home. In this way there is
always a young and vigorous queen at the head of affairs, and the
well-being of the parent stock is assured. But advanced bee-keepers,
whose sole object is to get a large honey yield, have long recognised
that this is a very expensive way of rejuvenating old colonies. The
parent hive will give no surplus honey for that season; and the swarm,
unless it is a large and very early one, will do little else than furnish
its brood-nest for the coming winter. But if swarming be prevented, and
the stock requeened artificially every two years, we keep an immense
population always ready for the great honey-flow, whenever it begins.”
He took up the heavy barrow, laden with its pile of super-racks, and
started trundling it up the path, talking as he went.
“If only the bees could be persuaded to leave the queen-raising to the
bee-keeper, and would attend to nothing else but the great business of
honey-getting! But they won’t—at least, not yet. Perhaps in another
hundred years or so the old wild habits may be bred out of them; but at
present it is doubtful whether they are conscious of any ‘keeping’ at
all. They go the old tried paths determinedly; and the most that we can
accomplish is to undo that part of their work which is not to our liking,
or to make a smoother road for them in the direction they themselves have
chosen.”
“But you said just now,” I objected, “that no swarming was allowed among
your bees. How do you manage to prevent it?”
“It is not so much a question of prevention as of cure. Each hive must
be watched carefully from the beginning. From the time the queen
commences to lay, in the first mild days of spring, we keep the size of
the brood nest just a little ahead of her requirements. Every week or
two I put in a new frame of empty combs, and when she has ten frames to
work upon, and honey is getting plentiful, I begin to put on the
store-racks above, just as I am doing now. This will generally keep them
to business; but with all the care in the world the swarming fever will
sometimes set in. And then I always treat it in this way.”
He had stopped before one of the hives, where the bees were hanging in a
glistening brown cluster from the alighting-board; idling while their
fellows in the bee-garden seemed all possessed with a perfect fury of
work. I watched him as he lighted the smoker, a sort of bellows with a
wide tin funnel packed with chips of dry rotten wood. He stooped over
the hive, and sent three or four dense puffs of smoke into the entrance.
“That is called subduing the bees,” he explained, “but it really does
nothing of the kind. It only alarms them, and a frightened bee always
rushes and fills herself with honey, to be ready for any emergency. She
can imbibe enough to keep her for three or four days; and once secure of
immediate want, she waits with a sort of fatalistic calm for the
development of the trouble threatening.”
He halted a moment or two for this process to complete itself, then began
to open the hive. First the roof came off; then the woollen quilts and
square of linen beneath were gradually peeled from the tops of the
comb-frames, laying bare the interior of the hive. Out of its dim depths
came up a steady rumbling note like a train in a tunnel, but only a few
of the bees got on the wing and began to circle round our heads
viciously. The frames hung side by side, with a space of half an inch or
so between. The bee-master lifted them out carefully one by one.
“Now, see here,” he said, as he held up the first frame in the sunlight,
with the bees clinging in thousands to it, “this end comb ought to have
nothing but honey in it, but you see its centre is covered with
brood-cells. The queen has caught the bee-man napping, and has extended
her nursery to the utmost limit of the hive. She is at the end of her
tether, and has therefore decided to swarm. Directly the bees see this
they begin to prepare for the coming loss of their queen by raising
another, and to make sure of getting one they always breed three or
four.”
He took out the next comb and pointed to a round construction, about the
size and shape of an acorn, hanging from its lower edge.
“That is a queen cell; and here, on the next comb, are two more. One is
sealed over, you see, and may hatch out at any moment; and the others are
nearly ready for closing. They are always carefully guarded, or the old
queen would destroy them. And now to put an end to the swarming fit.”
He took out all the combs but the four centre ones; and, with a goose
wing, gently brushed the bees off them into the hive. The six combs were
then taken to the extricating-house hard by. The sealed honey-cells on
all of them were swiftly uncapped, and the honey thrown out by a turn or
two in the centrifugal machine. Now we went back to the hive. Right in
the centre the bee-master put a new, perfectly empty comb, and on each
side of this came the four principal brood frames with the queen still on
them. Outside of these again the combs from which we had extracted all
the honey were brought into position. And then a rack of new sections
was placed over all, and the hive quickly closed up. The entire process
seemed the work of only a few minutes.
“Now,” said the bee-master triumphantly, as he took up his barrow again,
“we have changed the whole aspect of affairs. The population of the hive
is as big as ever; but instead of a house of plenty it is a house of
dearth. The larder is empty, and the only cure for impending famine is
hard work; and the bees will soon find that out and set to again.
Moreover, the queen has now plenty of room for laying everywhere, and
those exasperating prison-cradles, with her future rivals hatching in
them, have been done away with. She has no further reason for flight,
and the bees, having had all their preparations destroyed, have the best
of reasons for keeping her. Above all, there is the new super-rack,
greatly increasing the hive space, and they will be given a second and
third rack, or even a fourth one, long before they feel the want of it.
Every motive for swarming has been removed, and the result to the
bee-master will probably be seventy or eighty pounds of surplus honey,
instead of none at all, if the bees had been left to their old primæval
ways.”
“You must always remember, however,” he added, as a final word, “that
bees do nothing invariably. ’Tis an old and threadbare saying amongst
bee-keepers, but there’s nothing truer under the sun. Bees have
exceptions to almost every rule. While all other creatures seem to keep
blindly to one pre-ordained way in everything they do, you can never be
certain at any time that bees will not reverse their ordinary course to
meet circumstances you may know nothing of. And that is all the more
reason why the bee-master himself should allow no deviations in his own
work about the hives: his ways must be as the ways of the Medes and
Persians.”