Hibernation, and no Honey
But, thus far in the history of bee-life, it has been impossible for a hive to re-queen itself unless a newly-laid egg, or very young larva, has been available for the purpose. Hibernation without a queen is, therefore, in the present stage of honey-bee wisdom, unattainable, because there would be neither egg nor grub to work from in the spring, when another queen-mother was needed, and the stock must inevitably perish. Here, however, the scientific bee-master could give his colonies an invaluable hint, though greatly to his own disadvantage. In the ordinary heat of the brood-chamber an egg takes about three days to hatch, but it has been ascertained that a sudden fall in temperature will often delay this process. The germ of life in all eggs is notoriously hardy; and it is conceivable that by a system of cold storage, as carefully studied and ingeniously regulated as are most other affairs of the hive, the bees might succeed in preserving eggs throughout the winter in a state of suspended, but not irresuscitable life. And if ever the honey-bee, in some future age, discovers this possibility, she will infallibly become a true hibernating insect, and join the ranks of the summer loiterers and merry-makers. But the bee-master will get no more honey.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN
“Books,” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, looking round through grey wreaths of tobacco-smoke at his crowded shelves, “books seem to tell ye most things ne’ersome-matter; but when it comes to books on bees—well, ’tis somehow quite another pair o’ shoes.”
He stopped to listen to the wind, blowing great guns outside in the winter darkness. The little cottage seemed to crouch and shudder beneath the blast, and the rain drove against the lattice-windows with a sobbing, timorous note. The bee-master drew the old oak settle nearer to the fire, and sat for a moment silently watching the comfortable blaze.
“‘True as print,’” he went on, lapsing more and more into the quaint, tangy Sussex dialect, as his theme impressed him; “’twas an old saying o’ my father’s; and right enough, maybe, in his time. A’ couldn’t read, to be sure; so a’ might have been ower unsceptical. But books was too expensive in those days to put many lies into.”
He took down at random from the case on the chimney-breast about a dozen modern, paper-covered treatises on bee-keeping, and threw them, rather contemptuously, on the table.
“I’m not saying, mind ye,” he hastened to add, “that there’s a word against truth in any one of them. They’re all true enough, no doubt, for they contradict each other at every turn. ’Tis as if one man said roses was white; and another said, ‘No, you’re wrong, they’re yaller’; and a third said, ‘Y’are both wrong, they’re red.’ And when folks are in dispute in this way, because they agree, and not because they differ, there’s little hope of ever pacifying them.
“I heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years ago, that had a good word about bees. Said she, ‘They never do anything invariably’; and she warn’t far off the truth. She knew her own sex, did wise Mrs Tupper. Now, the trouble with the book-writers on bees is that they try to make a science of something that can never rightly be a science at all. They try to add two numbers together that they don’t know, an’ that are allers changing, and are surprised if they don’t arrive at an exact total. There’s the bees, and there’s the weather: together the result will be so many pounds of honey. If the English climate went by the calendar, and the bees worked according to unchangeable rules, you might reckon out your honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping would be little more than sitting in a summer-house and figuring on a slate. But with frosts in June, and August weather in February, and your honey-makers naught but a tribe of whimsy, sex-thwarted wimmin-folk, a nation of everlasting spinsters—how can bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist an’ turn o’ the way shows something cur’ous or different?”
He stopped to recharge his pipe from the earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like an old straw beehive, which had yielded solace to many a past generation of the Warrilow clan.