If in this month you find it difficult to escape the robbers, carry your super into your cottage, near a window, and expose one side of the super to the window—the side having egress for the bees. Very soon great numbers will fly to the window-panes, and by opening it for a few minutes they will rush out, and robber bees will have no time to enter.
I have been asked—Who and what is the queen, and who are those lazy abbots I referred to as drones? The queen is nearly twice the length of the common bee, of elegant proportions and shape. On seeing her, you would at once pronounce her a duchess or a queen. But it is a singular fact, and well worthy the consideration of sanitary students, that she rises originally from the ranks, and that treatment makes all the difference. The egg deposited seems the same as that of the ordinary bee, but we find it always laid in a cell three times the size of common cells. As soon as the young queen comes from the egg, numbers of nurse bees wait on her; she receives finer and more delicate food, more air, a warmer, larger, and nicer house, and apparently she is the creation of circumstances. She is the only female bee. The working-bees are neuters, really imperfectly developed females; the queen's husband is a drone. With queenly prerogative and dignity she selects her consort, and off they fly on a wedding-trip, and spend the honeymoon amid sunshine and flowers. But it is asked—Why are there so many drones in a hive, if there is only one wife? This is a very hard problem. But one part of it seems to me very clear. When the Queen's countless eggs come to be hatched, the temperature of the hive must be raised to 85° or 90° Fahrenheit. The bees must go out of doors to work. The fat, round, and lazy drones are really the fuel. They accordingly give out heat when most wanted. Mr. Cotton holds this view also. This year I had two stock-hives during breeding that stood, from 10 to 4 o'clock, at 95° Fahrenheit. We thus learn that fat old gentlemen are of use, and that Mr. Banting's system is not always wise or expedient. There are in a good hive three or four royal cells; consequently, three or four queens will turn up. What follows? If the heat be great and additional room withheld, the old queen will abdicate and head a secession—in apiarian language, a swarm—and the next senior queen will ascend the throne. If there be still no increase of room allowed, she, too, will secede and head a second secession—in apiarian phrase, a caste—usually feeble, requiring when hived to be fed, and rarely a desirable issue. But when increased space is given, and a drawing-room is added to the dining-room, and boudoirs to the nursery, I am asked what follows. Do the princesses live together in harmony? My answer, from very careful observation, reveals a sad fact—a fact I cannot suppose to have been instituted in Paradise. If two queens turn up in a hive with plenty of space, but related space, they fight it out till one alone lives. So settled is this law, that the bees hound on the more timid and cowardly of the two queens, and insist on victory with supremacy or death. This is to me a very melancholy trait in a favourite study; but I suppose some higher law requires it.
It has been urged as a commercial question that honey is not now of the same importance as it was before the sugar-cane was discovered, and that gas has superseded wax candles. I am satisfied from many considerations, that if people would eat honey at breakfast instead of rancid London butter and nasty greasy bacon, not only would their health be better, but their temper would be sweeter. I find invariably that people who like honey are persons of genial and affectionate temper. If Mr. Cobden and Mr. Roebuck had only taken honey at breakfast, or a very choice fragment of virgin honey at dessert, they would never have given utterance to those vinegar and acetic-acid speeches which did them no credit. I wish somebody would send Mr. Spurgeon a super of good honey. Three months' diet on this celestial food would induce him to give up those shockingly bitter and unchristian tirades he has been lately making against the clergy of the Church of England. The producers of honey never draw their stings unless in defence of their homesteads, and the eaters and admirers of honey rarely indulge in acrimonious language. I believe a great deal of bad feeling is not moral or mental, but physical, in its origin. If you have in a congregation, or in a school, or in a convocation, some one who sets everybody by the ears, treat him to a little honey at breakfast for six months, and the "thorn will blossom as the rose." People that can't eat honey—"hunc tu caveto"—they can't ever fit "a land overflowing with milk and honey."
I have not answered half the letters I have received; but because you have been so good as to take an interest in this very interesting subject, I intend to send you, as an expression of my thanks, a small glass super of honey filled from heath during July. If you do not eat honey, which I hope and, indeed, am sure is not the fact, you can give a portion to any inmates of your great hive in Printing-house-square who may be prone to use their stings too freely.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
A Bee-master.
Tunbridge Wells, August 2.
The origin of the following letter was a very foolish letter which a correspondent sent to The Times. His cannot be the deliberate conviction of anyone acquainted with bees. Perhaps he was offended that no notice was taken of a very unsatisfactory hive patented by him. But as I could not praise, I thought it unnecessary to blame.
A Hornet Among the Bees.
To the Editor of The Times.
Sir,—It is well that bees have not learnt to read The Times. Did they see all that your correspondent says about them, they would send a battalion to his residence, and ere they returned to Tunbridge Wells they would make their calumniator exhaust all his remedies for bee-stings. Had this good gentleman eaten more honey and drank less vinegar he would have written a more affectionate letter; and had he watched the habits of bees as I have done, or studied the results of the investigations of Huber, he would not surely have written with ignorance so crass. I am not irritated with him, but I am immensely jealous for the honour and good name of my bees. It is said of some crotchety people, "they have each a bee in his bonnet," but I venture to think of your correspondent, "he has a wasp in his bonnet." The only philosophical way by which I can account for the absurdities of this letter is that it was written, as he observes, "for our continental and transatlantic brethren," neither of whom have any precedent or encouragement for recent Austro-Prussian misdeeds, or American democracy and its recent excesses, in the habits and instincts of bees.