In Butler’s Feminine Monarchie, we are gravely told of a certain bee-mistress, who, finding her hives fruitless, and their tenants pining away with sickness, by the advice of another female, went to receive the eucharist, and having kept it in her mouth, placed it, on her return home, in one of the diseased hives. The plague ceased; honey accumulated; and, on examining the inside, she found a waxen chapel and altar, of wondrous architecture, and even bells of the same materials.—Gent. Mag. 1809. p. 316.
To prove that there is much of fancy in the traditional accounts respecting bee-maladies, I will mention the various hypotheses concerning dysentery. Columella speaks of its arising from the bees feeding upon honey collected from elm and spurge blossoms; my own neighbourhood abounds with both; but I never met with nor scarcely heard of dysentery among the bees here. Evelyn in his Sylva expresses doubts upon the subject; and Dr. Evans says he made particular inquiries of some friends in Worcestershire, which (like this county—Herefordshire) abounds with elms, without obtaining satisfactory information.
Dysentery has also been said to be produced by a surfeit of vernal honey, simply as such, from whatever flowers derived: were this true it would occur in all neighbourhoods. With respect to its proceeding from their eating wax, I am decidedly of opinion that wax never constitutes any part of their food, under any circumstances; not a tittle of evidence can be adduced in support of such an assertion. Wax is an excrementitious matter, secreted among the abdominal folds of the bees for the sole purpose of constructing the honey and brood-combs: the scraps of wax that are observed in winter and spring upon the hive floors, and which, to the minds of common observers, convey the idea that they are crumbs caused by the bees consuming the wax for food, are produced by their nibbling the lids of the cells to uncover the honey. If Madame Vicat’s theory were correct, what would become of all the bees in Siberia and other northern regions? Huish says he never found honey in this country to candy in the combs, but adds that Bonner assured him that he had experienced it. Vide chapter on [Honey].
Kirby and Spence have given it as their opinion, that dysentery arises from the bees having an insufficiency of pollen or bee-bread to eat with their honey. We have no evidence that pollen constitutes any part of the food of adult bees; and if it did, they have generally opportunities of storing it very abundantly, in the autumn, as well as in the spring: and such is the provident industry of bees, that a considerable surplus is always found in every stock-hive.
Wildman and Huish recommend salt for preserving the health of bees; and their frequenting stable drains and other receptacles of urine gives countenance to this recommendation, as it seems probable that the saline matter contained in those fluids attracts the bees, their desire for it overcoming that repugnance to offensive odours which would otherwise occasion them to avoid such places. Even fresh urine has been recommended by Ranconi, an Italian author, in case the bees should be attacked by dysentery;—in all probability a weak solution of salt would be more acceptable and equally efficacious. I always introduce a small portion of it into the syrup with which I feed my bees. Keys says that they are not fond of salt. Vide [Page 186].
I will close this chapter on the Diseases of Bees with an extract from Nicholson’s Journal, vol. xxiii. p. 234: Scientific Intelligence.
“A large swarm of bees having settled on a branch of the poison ash, (Rhus Vernix,) in the county of West Chester in America, was taken into a hive of fir at three o’clock in the afternoon, and removed to the place where it was to remain, at nine. About five the next morning the bees were found dead, swelled to double their natural size, and black, except a few, which appeared torpid and feeble, and soon died on exposure to the air.” This was attributed to their being poisoned by the effluvia of the Rhus Vernix.