SO many and so urgent have been the requests of my correspondents to reprint these letters, that I have carefully gone over them, corrected clerical errors, and reproduced them. They may amuse as well as teach. I append them in the order of their appearance. They were unfortunate enough to provoke the wrath of two or three hive-inventors or patentees, the merits of whose crooked and uncomfortable productions the writer could not appreciate; but they have received the warmest eulogies of great numbers to whom they conveyed new and interesting information.
It is a pity that petty jealousies should distill their poison on so pleasant a theme, and that bees should in this case turn wasps.
A very curious coincidence occurred in the course of the correspondence on bees which appeared in The Times. A succession of letters appeared in various more or less obscure newspapers, beginning at Exeter and moving northward to the Orkneys, each, mutatis mutandis, the repetition of the first. They invariably began by a laborious attempt to prove that the writer knows nothing of apiculture or prophecy, but in no one instance disproving a single position or showing the author's ignorance of apiculture, but in more than one instance deploring the writer's oversight of this or that hive. Every one of these writers—plainly under the inspiration of one—assumes that because the writer did not allude to his mode of treatment, he was ignorant of bee-management. The Bee-master had no idea there was such concert among bee-keepers, or that, in giving an account of his intercourse with his bees, he was putting his hands into hornets' nests. But wasps have been a terrible plague this autumn.
One writer in a Scotch paper, who gives bees no credit for any ordinary virtue, and regards them purely as mechanical toys, writes thus:—
"This Bee-master says that 'the bee leaves her house, traverses a mile or two distant, and returns to her home—one amid twenty contiguous ones—with unerring certainty.' This was the general opinion up till lately—that the bee always returned to its own hive—in fact, there was no means of proving the contrary until the introduction of the Ligurian variety of bee. For the information of 'A Bee-master,' I must tell him that they do not at all times go back to their own home, but make a mistake and enter their neighbour's. This fact I soon ascertained after I got the Ligurians, as in a short time I saw them going into all my other common hives, more or less, and a neighbour nearly a mile away from this found the Ligurians had joined one of his swarms when in the act of swarming. These are facts which cannot be controverted, and prove that 'A Bee-master' ought to make himself master of his subject before he attempts to teach others. Queens, too, are frequently killed by entering into other hives when placed near each other, through their mistaking the one for the other; but these facts were not known to the generality of bee-keepers until they used the bar hives, when all the economy of the interior could be examined at pleasure."
This foolish logician introduces foreigners to an English hive. They do not act like English bees—in short, they are not acquainted with a country in which they are not acclimatised; and from the blunders of the Ligurian foreigners he infers the ignorance of the British bee. This is a specimen of the rubbish printed from Devon to Haddington.
Another position of this Scotchman with a bee in his bonnet is as follows:—
"In removing a super—that is, a top or bonnet—he says they should be taken one hundred yards away from the hive, and the bees will fly back to the hive in about an hour. This I think a very bad plan. In the first place, if taken off in a fine day the bees would not leave it in an hour, and if there were any bees near, they would find it out in that time, their scent or sense of smell being so strong, and he would never get them away; and, besides, he would be very apt to take the queen away also, she being often found in the top, and she might not be able to fly back. It is certainly a bad plan in this part of the country, especially when the weather is cold in the autumn. When removing the heather honey, blow a few puffs of smoke from a burning rag into a super, and take it off, turning it upside down, putting on it another empty super of the same size, with cloth wrapped round where they meet, to keep out light. Next give the super containing the honey and the bees a few taps with a piece of stick at intervals. The bees, when filled with honey, which they will do as soon as disturbed, will ascend into the empty super, and if the queen should be there she will lead them at once, and they can all be put back into the hive. Any top can be emptied of bees in fifteen minutes by doing it in this way, and without running risk of losing the queen."
Now, in ninety-nine cases in a hundred the queen is not in the super, and an intelligent bee-master can take care she is not there before he removes the super; and, in the next place, The Times Bee-master expressly stated his entire aversion to smoking bees for such a purpose; and earlier than August there is no risk of corsair bees. Besides, preference of one plan to another is not necessarily proof of ignorance.
This mere copyist of Devon remarks:—