BEES AND THEIR MASTERS
THERE are three great tokens of the coming of spring in the country—the
elm-blossom, the cry of the young lambs, and the first rich song of the
awakening bees.
All three come together about the end of February or beginning of March,
and break into the winter dearth and silence in much the same sudden,
unpremeditated way. You look at the woodlands, cowering under the lash
of the shrill north wind, and all seems bare and black and lifeless. But
the wind dies down in a fiery sunset. With the darkness comes a warm
breath out of the west. On the morrow the spring sunshine runs high
through all the valleys like liquid gold; the elm-tops are ablaze with
purple; from the lambing-pens far and near a new cry lifts into the
still, warm air; and in the bee-gardens there is the unwonted,
old-remembered symphony, prophetic of the coming summer days.
The shepherd, the bee-man, the woodlander—these three live in the focus
of the seasons, and feel their changes long before any other class of
country folk. But the bee-man, if he would prosper, must take the sun as
his veritable daily guide from year’s end to year’s end. Those whose
conception of a bee-keeper is mainly of one who looks on from his cottage
door while his winged thousands work for him, and who has but to stretch
out his hand once a year to gather the hoard he has had no part in
winning, know little of modern beemanship. This would be almost
literally true of the old skeppist days, when bees were left much to
their own devices, and thirty pounds of indifferent honey was reckoned a
good take from a populous hive. But the modern movable comb-frame has
altered all that. Now ninety or a hundred pounds weight of honey per
hive is expected, with ordinarily good seasons, on a well-managed
bee-farm; and in exceptional honey-flows very strong stocks of bees have
been known to double and even treble that amount.
The movable comb-frame has three prime uses. The hives can be opened at
any time and their condition ascertained without having to wait for
outside indications. Brood-combs, with the young bees all ready to hatch
out, can be taken from strong colonies and given to weak ones, and thus
the population of all stocks may be equalised. The filled honeycombs can
be removed, emptied by the centrifugal extractor, and the combs returned
to the hive ready for another charge; and so the most onerous and
exacting labour of the hive, comb-building, is largely obviated.
The modern beehive has another great advantage over the old straw skep,
in that its size can be regulated according to the needs of each colony.
More combs can be added as the stock grows, and thus no limit is set to
its capacity. With the ancient form of hive fifteen or twenty thousand
bees meant a crowded citadel, and there was nothing for it but to relieve
the congestion by swarming. But the swarming habit has always been the
principal obstacle to large honey-takes; and the problem which the modern
bee-keeper has to solve is how to prevent his stocks from thus breaking
themselves up into several hopelessly weak detachments.
It is all a war of wits between the bees and their masters. In nature
the honey-bee is possessed of an inveterate caution. Famine is
especially dreaded, and the number of mouths to fill in a hive is always
kept strictly to the limits of the incoming food-supply. Thus a natural
bee-colony is seldom ready for the honey-flow when it begins in early
April, because it is only then that the raising of the young brood is
allowed its fullest scope. This, however, is of no importance as far as
the bees themselves are concerned, for a balance of stores of about
twenty pounds weight at the end of a season will safely carry the most
populous colony through any ordinary winter.
But from the bee-master’s point of view it means practically a lost
harvest. All the arts and devices of the modern bee-keeper, therefore,
are set to work to overcome this timid conservatism of the hives, and to
induce the creation of immense colonies of worker-bees as early as
possible in the season, so that there may be no lack of labourers when
the harvest is ready.
These first warm days of March, that bring the elm-blossom, and the cry
of the lambs, and the old sweet music of the bee-gardens together, really
form the most critical time of all for the apiarist who depends on his
honey for his bread-and-butter. It is the natural beginning of the
bee-year, and on his skill as a craftsman from now onward all chance of a
prosperous season will rest. It is true that, within the hive, the bees
have been awake and stirring for a long time past. Ever since the “turn
of the days,” just before Christmas, the queen-mother has been busy; and
now there are young bees, little grey fluffy creatures, everywhere in the
throng; and the area of sealed brood-cells is steadily growing. But it
is only now that the world out-of-doors becomes of any interest to the
bees.
This is the time when the scientific bee-man must get to work. His whole
policy is one of benevolent fraud. He knows that the population in his
hives will not be allowed to increase until there is a steady, assured
income of nectar and pollen. He cannot create an early flower-crop, but
he does almost the same thing. Every hive is supplied with a
feeding-stage, where cane-sugar syrup, of nearly the same consistency as
the natural flower-secretion, is administered constantly; and he places
trays full of pea-flour at different stations amongst his hives, as a
substitute for pollen. There is a special art in the administration of
this sugar-syrup. One might think that if the bees required feeding at
all, the more they were given the better they would thrive. But
experience is all against this notion. The artificial food is given, not
to replenish an exhausted larder, but to simulate a natural new supply.
This, in the ordinary state of things, would begin in about a month’s
time, coming at first scantily, and gradually increasing. By
syrup-feeding early in March, the bee-master sets the clock of the year
forward by many weeks. He imitates nature by arranging his
feeding-stages so that the supply of syrup can be limited to the actual
day-to-day wants of the colony, allowing the bees freer access to the
syrup-bottles from time to time as their numbers augment.
If this is adroitly done, the effect on the colony is remarkable. The
little company of bees whose part it is to direct the actions of the
queen-mother, seeing what is apparently the natural fresh supply of food
coming in, in daily increasing quantities, at length cast their
hereditary reserve aside, and allow the queen fullest scope for
egg-laying. The result is that by the time the real honey-flow commences
the population of each hive is double what it would be if it had been
left to its own resources, and the honey-yield is more than
proportionately great. It is well know among bee-men that a hive
containing, say, forty thousand workers will produce very much more honey
than two hives together numbering twenty thousand each.
There is another vital consideration in this work of early stimulation of
the hives, which the capable bee-master will never neglect. When the
natural honey-glut is on, the whole hive reeks with the odours given off
from the evaporating nectar. The raw material, as gathered from the
flowers, must be reduced by the heat of the hive and other agencies to
about one-quarter of its original bulk before it is changed into mature
honey. The artificial food given to the bees will, of course, have none
of this scent, and the old honey-stores in the hive are hermetically
sealed under their waxen cappings. To complete the deception which has
been so elaborately contrived, the bee-master must furnish his hives with
a new atmosphere. This he does by slicing off the cappings from some of
the old store-combs, thus letting out their imprisoned fragrance, and
filling the hive at once with the very essence of the clover-fields where
the bees worked in the bygone summer days. The smell of the honey at
this time, combined with the regular and increasing supply of syrup, acts
like a powerful stimulant on the whole stock, and the work of
brood-raising goes rapidly forward.
In intensive culture of all kinds there are risks to be run peculiar to
the artificial state of things engendered, and modern bee-breeding is no
exception to the rule. When once this fictile prosperity is installed by
the bee-master, no lapse or variation in the due amount of food must
occur. Even a single day’s remission of supplies may undo all that a
month’s careful manipulation has brought about. English bees understand
their native climate only too well, and the bitter experience of former
years has taught them to be prepared for a return of hard weather at any
moment. Under natural conditions, if a few weeks’ warmth has induced
them to raise population, and a sudden return of cold ensues, the bees
will take very prompt and stern measures to meet the threatening calamity
of starvation. The queen will cease laying at once; all unhatched brood
will be ruthlessly torn from its cradle-cells and destroyed; old, useless
bees will be expelled from the colony. And this is exactly what will
happen if the artificial food-supply is allowed to fail even for the
shortest period.