But it is among the writings of the old beemen with a taste for the quack-doctor’s art that some of the quaintest notions are to be found. We are told that honey, well rubbed into the scalp night and morning, is a sovereign remedy for baldness, and if it was mixed with a few dead bees and a little old comb well pounded, it was still more efficacious. Dead bees, dried and reduced to a powder, form a principal ingredient in all sorts of nostrums of the time. This powder, mixed with water and drunk every morning, is recommended as an unfailing cleanser to the system. And if the heads of a large number of bees are collected, burned, and the ashes compounded with a little honey, it makes an excellent salve for all sorts of eye disorders.
There was a famous preparation called Oxymel, which was in great vogue in mediæval times. It seems to have been nothing more than a mixture of honey, water, and vinegar; but it was accredited with extraordinary virtues. It was an infallible cure for sciatica, gout, and kindred ailments; and one writer also tells us that it was “good to gargarize with in a Squinancy.”
But honey and dead bees were not the only products of the hives which were pressed into medical service. Wax also was believed to have exceptional curative powers in all sorts of human ills. It had the faculty of curing ulcers, and “if the quantity of a Pease in Wax be swallowed down of Nurces, it doth dissolve the Milke curdled in the paps.” It was also used as an embrocation for stiff joints and aching muscles. The supposed curative value of beeswax in its natural state, however, was as nothing compared to its capabilities when distilled. This preparation, known as Oil of Wax, and famous at the time all the world over, seems to have come nearer the ideal of a panacea—a cure-all—than anything else before or since. The making of Oil of Wax seems to have been a very complicated affair. First the wax had to be melted, poured into sweet wine, and wrung out in the hands. This was done seven times, using fresh wine at each operation. Then the wax was placed in a retort with a quantity of red-brick powder, and carefully distilled. A yellow oil came over into the receiver, and this was distilled a second time, when the “Coelestiall or Divine medicine” was ready. Miraculous portents seem to have accompanied its preparation, for we are told that “in the coming forth of this Oile there appeareth in the Receiver the foure Elements, the Fire, the Aire, the Water, and the Earth, right marvellous to see.”
The power to stop immediately the falling out of the hair, heal the most serious wounds in a few days, and cure toothache and pains in the back, can be reckoned only among its minor virtues. Much greater properties were claimed for Oil of Wax, for it not only “killeth worms and cureth palsy and distempered spleens, but it bringeth forth the dead or living child.”
One last extract must be given from the same old writer. It relates to the generation of bees, and brings us out, perhaps, on the highest pinnacle of the marvellous. After a learned dissertation on the method of breeding bees from a dead ox—assuring us, however, that if we can procure a dead lion for the purpose, it will be much better, as then the bees will have a lion-like courage—the writer goes on to explain how bees may be produced in another way. We are to save all dead bees, burn them, sprinkle the ashes with wine, and then leave them exposed to the sun in a warm place. In a little while, we are told, all the bees so treated will come to life again, and we shall then have a new stock ready for hiving.
Dipping into these time-worn records of the Middle Ages, with their embrowned, scarce legible type and their antiquated phraseology, one comes at last to realise how very little the old bee-masters actually understood of the true ways of the honey-bee, or, indeed, of any real essential in bee-craft. And yet the production of honey and wax must have been an industry very largely developed in those days. Somehow or other, in spite of archaic theories and useless interference in the work of their hives, these people must have contrived to supply a market of whose magnitude we can nowadays form little conception. The trade in wax alone must have been a very large one, for, except in the poorest tenements, this formed the only available source of artificial light. And honey was in much more universal demand than it is now, because cane-sugar could hardly have developed into a serious rival as a sweetening agent among the masses at a time when it stood, perhaps, at two shillings a pound.
But in speculations of this kind, it must be borne in mind that, although the men who wrote about bees displayed so picturesque an ignorance in all matters appertaining to their charges, these formed a very small minority among the bee-keepers as a whole. Probably the bulk of the supply in honey and wax came from bee-gardens, whose owners neither knew nor cared anything about books, and were concerned only in the practical side of the work, where their knowledge, hereditary for the most part, amply sufficed for the part they played in it.
Moreover, it is only in latter-day, scientific apiculture that the work of the bee-master counts to any great extent. Nowadays, under the light of twentieth-century knowledge, this is competent to bring about the doubling, and even trebling, of the honey-harvest possible under the ancient methods. But the old skeppists did, and could do, little more than look on at the work of their bees, and here and there put a scarce availing hand to it. Nearly all the credit for the results achieved in those days must be given to the bees themselves, who, untold ages before, had brought to finite perfection their remarkable systems and policies. In all likelihood the bee-masters, the practical men who owned the hives, had much the same shrewd faculty of leaving things alone in far-off times as we observe among the skeppists of the last generation. In many ways, what they did at last come to do they did ill, notably in the apparently insane practice of destroying the bees to obtain the honey. But even this was not so foolish a procedure as it appears to-day. It was a plain matter of business, according to the lights of the time. Their process was to condemn to the sulphur-pit all the lightest and the heaviest of their stocks. Experience taught them that the weak colonies stood little chance of getting through the winter unless they were artificially fed; while if the bees of the large colonies were preserved, after being robbed of their stores, they would need the same provision. It was a matter of arithmetic. Artificial feeding was then a much more costly affair than it is to-day, and the reckoning came out well on the side of slaughter. The worst part of the business, so far as modern scientific bee-breeders are concerned, is that the old system of destruction tended to preserve only those strains of bees who were inveterate swarmers; while the steady, industrious stay-at-homes, who accumulated the largest stores of honey, were invariably exterminated. This is a fateful legacy to have passed on, when we consider that one of the chief aims of modern bee-science is to abolish swarming altogether. The swarming habit is one of the greatest obstacles in the way of a large honey yield, and until a race of non-swarming bees has been evolved by modern breeders there will always be this element of uncertainty in the honey harvest.
Latter-day beemen, therefore, join the chorus of disapproval of this old, senseless custom of bee-burning, rather because it has given them the task of undoing the work of ages before any progress is possible, than from the generally accepted humanitarian reasons.