He had stopped before one of the hives, where the bees were hanging in a glistening brown cluster from the alighting-board; idling while their fellows in the bee-garden seemed all possessed with a perfect fury of work. I watched him as he lighted the smoker, a sort of bellows with a wide tin funnel packed with chips of dry rotten wood. He stooped over the hive, and sent three or four dense puffs of smoke into the entrance.
“That is called subduing the bees,” he explained, “but it really does nothing of the kind. It only alarms them, and a frightened bee always rushes and fills herself with honey, to be ready for any emergency. She can imbibe enough to keep her for three or four days; and once secure of immediate want, she waits with a sort of fatalistic calm for the development of the trouble threatening.”
He halted a moment or two for this process to complete itself, then began to open the hive. First the roof came off; then the woollen quilts and square of linen beneath were gradually peeled from the tops of the comb-frames, laying bare the interior of the hive. Out of its dim depths came up a steady rumbling note like a train in a tunnel, but only a few of the bees got on the wing and began to circle round our heads viciously. The frames hung side by side, with a space of half an inch or so between. The bee-master lifted them out carefully one by one.
“Now, see here,” he said, as he held up the first frame in the sunlight, with the bees clinging in thousands to it, “this end comb ought to have nothing but honey in it, but you see its centre is covered with brood-cells. The queen has caught the bee-man napping, and has extended her nursery to the utmost limit of the hive. She is at the end of her tether, and has therefore decided to swarm. Directly the bees see this they begin to prepare for the coming loss of their queen by raising another, and to make sure of getting one they always breed three or four.”
He took out the next comb and pointed to a round construction, about the size and shape of an acorn, hanging from its lower edge.
“That is a queen cell; and here, on the next comb, are two more. One is sealed over, you see, and may hatch out at any moment; and the others are nearly ready for closing. They are always carefully guarded, or the old queen would destroy them. And now to put an end to the swarming fit.”
He took out all the combs but the four centre ones; and, with a goose wing, gently brushed the bees off them into the hive. The six combs were then taken to the extricating-house hard by. The sealed honey-cells on all of them were swiftly uncapped, and the honey thrown out by a turn or two in the centrifugal machine. Now we went back to the hive. Right in the centre the bee-master put a new, perfectly empty comb, and on each side of this came the four principal brood frames with the queen still on them. Outside of these again the combs from which we had extracted all the honey were brought into position. And then a rack of new sections was placed over all, and the hive quickly closed up. The entire process seemed the work of only a few minutes.
“Now,” said the bee-master triumphantly, as he took up his barrow again, “we have changed the whole aspect of affairs. The population of the hive is as big as ever; but instead of a house of plenty it is a house of dearth. The larder is empty, and the only cure for impending famine is hard work; and the bees will soon find that out and set to again. Moreover, the queen has now plenty of room for laying everywhere, and those exasperating prison-cradles, with her future rivals hatching in them, have been done away with. She has no further reason for flight, and the bees, having had all their preparations destroyed, have the best of reasons for keeping her. Above all, there is the new super-rack, greatly increasing the hive space, and they will be given a second and third rack, or even a fourth one, long before they feel the want of it. Every motive for swarming has been removed, and the result to the bee-master will probably be seventy or eighty pounds of surplus honey, instead of none at all, if the bees had been left to their old primæval ways.”
“You must always remember, however,” he added, as a final word, “that bees do nothing invariably. ’Tis an old and threadbare saying amongst bee-keepers, but there’s nothing truer under the sun. Bees have exceptions to almost every rule. While all other creatures seem to keep blindly to one pre-ordained way in everything they do, you can never be certain at any time that bees will not reverse their ordinary course to meet circumstances you may know nothing of. And that is all the more reason why the bee-master himself should allow no deviations in his own work about the hives: his ways must be as the ways of the Medes and Persians.”