WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-FARM
THE light snow covered the path through the bee-farm, and whitened the
roof of every hive. In the red winter twilight it looked more like a
human city than ever, with its long double rows of miniature houses
stretching away into the dusk on either hand, and its broad central
thoroughfare, where the larger hives crowded shoulder to shoulder,
casting their black shadows over the glimmering snow.
The bee-master led the way towards the extracting-house at the end of the
garden, as full of his work, seemingly, as ever he had been in the press
of summer days. There was noise enough going on in the long lighted
building ahead of us, but I missed the droning song of the great
extractor itself.
[Picture: “Hard Times for the Bees”]
“No; we have done with honey work for this year,” said the old bee-man.
“It is all bottled and cased long ago, and most of it gone to London.
But there’s work enough still, as you’ll see. The bees get their long
rest in the winter; but, on a big honey-farm, the humans must work all
the year round.”
As we drew into the zone of light from the windows, many sounds that from
afar had seemed incongruous enough on the silent, frost-bound evening
began to explain themselves. The whole building was full of busy life.
A furnace roared under a great caldron of smoking syrup, which the
foreman was vigorously stirring. In the far corner an oil engine clanked
and spluttered. A circular saw was screaming through a baulk of timber,
slicing it up into thin planks as a man would turn over the leaves of a
book. Planing machines and hammers and handsaws innumerable added their
voices to the general chorus; and out of the shining steel jaws of an
implement that looked half printing-press and half clothes-wringer there
flowed sheet after sheet of some glistening golden material, the use of
which I could only dimly guess at.
But I had time only for one swift glance at this mysterious monster. The
bee-master gripped me by the arm and drew me towards the furnace.
“This is bee-candy,” he explained, “winter food for the hives. We make a
lot of it and send it all over the country. But it’s ticklish work.
When the syrup comes to the galloping-point it must boil for one minute,
no more and no less. If we boil it too little it won’t set, and if too
much it goes hard, and the bees can’t take it.”
He took up his station now, watch in hand, close to the man who was
stirring, while two or three others looked anxiously on.
“Time!” shouted the bee-master.
The great caldron swung off the stove on its suspending chain. Near the
fire stood a water tank, and into this the big vessel of boiling syrup
was suddenly doused right up to the brim, the stirrer labouring all the
time at the seething grey mass more furiously than ever.
“The quicker we can cool it the better it is,” explained the old
bee-keeper, through the steam. He was peering into the caldron as he
spoke, watching the syrup change from dark clear grey to a dirty white,
like half-thawed snow. Now he gave a sudden signal. A strong rod was
instantly passed through the handles of the caldron. The vessel was
whisked out of its icy bath and borne rapidly away. Following hard upon
its heels, we saw the bearers halt near some long, low trestle-tables,
where hundreds of little wooden boxes were ranged side by side. Into
these the thick, sludgy syrup was poured as rapidly as possible, until
all were filled.
“Each box,” said the bee-master, as we watched the candy gradually
setting snow-white in its wooden frames, “each box holds about a pound.
The box is put into the hive upside-down on the top of the comb-frames,
just over the cluster of bees; and the bottom is glazed because then you
can see when the candy is exhausted, and the time has come to put on
another case. What is it made of? Well, every maker has his own private
formula, and mine is a secret like the rest. But it is sugar,
mostly—cane-sugar. Beet-sugar will not do; it is injurious to the bees.
“But candy-making,” he went on, as we moved slowly through the populous
building, “is by no means the only winter work on a bee-farm. There are
the hives to make for next season; all those we shall need for ourselves,
and hundreds more we sell in the spring, either empty or stocked with
bees. Then here is the foundation mill.”
He turned to the contrivance I had noticed on my entry. The thin amber
sheets of material, like crinkled glass, were still flowing out between
the rollers. He took a sheet of it as it fell, and held it up to the
light. A fine hexagonal pattern covered it completely from edge to edge.
“This,” he said, “we call super-foundation. It is pure refined wax,
rolled into sheets as thin as paper, and milled on both sides with the
shapes of the cells. All combs now are built by the bees on this
artificial foundation; and there is enough wax here, thin as it is, to
make the entire honeycomb. The bees add nothing to it, but simply knead
it and draw it out into a comb two inches wide; and so all the time
needed for wax-making by the bees is saved just when time is most
precious—during the short season of the honey-flow.”
He took down a sheet from another pile close at hand.
“All that thin foundation,” he explained, “is for section-honey, and will
be eaten. But this you could not eat. This is brood-foundation, made
extra strong to bear the great heat of the lower hive. It is put into
the brood-nest, and the cells reared on it are the cradles for the young
bees. See how dense and brown it is, and how thick; it is six or seven
times as heavy as the other. But it is all pure wax, though not so
refined, and is made in the same way, serving the same useful,
time-saving purpose.”
We moved on towards the store-rooms, out of the clatter of the machinery.
“It was a great day,” he said, reflectively, “a great day for bee-keeping
when foundation was invented. The bee-man who lets his hives work on the
old obsolete natural system nowadays makes a hopeless handicap of things.
Yet the saving of time and bee-labour is not the only, and is hardly the
most important, outcome of the use of foundation. It has done a great
deal more than that, for it has solved the very weighty problem of how to
keep the number of drones in a hive within reasonable limits.”
He opened the door of a small side-room. From ceiling to floor the walls
were covered with deep racks loaded with frames of empty comb, all ready
for next season. Taking down a couple of the frames, he brought them out
into the light.
“These will explain to you what I mean,” said he. “This first one is a
natural-built comb, made without the milled foundation. The centre and
upper part, you see, is covered on both sides with the small cells of the
worker-brood. But all the rest of the frame is filled with larger cells,
and in these only drones are bred. Bees, if left to themselves, will
always rear a great many more drones than are needed; and as the drones
gather no stores but only consume them in large quantities, a
superabundance of the male-bees in a hive must mean a diminished
honey-yield. But the use of foundation has changed all that. Now look
at this other frame. By filling all brood-frames with worker-foundation,
as has been done here, we compel the bees to make only small cells, in
which the rearing of drones is almost impossible; and so we keep the
whole brood-space in the hive available for the generation of the working
bee alone.”
“But,” I asked him, “are not drones absolutely necessary in a hive? The
population cannot increase without the male bees.”
“Good drones are just as important in a bee-garden as high-mettled,
prolific queens,” he said; “and drone-breeding on a small scale must form
part of the work on every modern bee-farm of any size. But my own
practice is to confine the drones to two or three hives only. These are
stationed in different parts of the farm. They are always selected
stocks of the finest and most vigorous strain, and in them I encourage
drone-breeding in every possible way. But the male bees in all
honey-producing hives are limited to a few hundreds at most.”
Coming out into the darkness from the brilliantly-lighted building, we
had gone some way on our homeward road through the crowded bee-farm
before we marked the change that had come over the sky. Heavy vaporous
clouds were slowly driving up from the west and blotting the stars out
one by one. All their frosty sparkle was gone, and the night air had no
longer the keen tooth of winter in it. The bee-master held up his hand.
“Listen!” he said. “Don’t you hear anything?”
I strained my ears to their utmost pitch. A dog barked forlornly in the
distant village. Some night-bird went past overhead with a faint
jangling cry. But the slumbering bee-city around us was as silent and
still as death.
“When you have lived among bees for forty years,” said the bee-master,
plodding on again, “you may get ears as long as mine. Just reckon it
out. The wind has changed; that curlew knows the warm weather is coming;
but the bees, huddled together in the midst of a double-walled hive,
found it out long ago. Now, there are between three and four hundred
hives here. At a very modest computation, there must be as many bees
crowded together on these few acres of land as there are people in the
whole of London and Brighton combined. And they are all awake, and
talking, and telling each other that the cold spell is past. That is
what I can hear now, and shall hear—down in the house yonder—all night
long.”