TO THE
CHAIRMAN OF THE BRITISH BEE-KEEPERS’
ASSOCIATION,
THOMAS WILLIAM COWAN, F.L.S., ETC.,
TO WHOSE LABOURS AND RESEARCHES
THE WRITER, AND ALL OTHER BEE-KEEPERS,
ARE UNDER A LASTING OBLIGATION.
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| Introduction: The Oldest Craft under the Sun | [ix] | |
| I. | The Ancients and the Honey-bee | [1] |
| II. | The Isle of Honey | [18] |
| III. | Bee-masters in the Middle Ages | [28] |
| IV. | At the City Gates | [50] |
| V. | The Commonwealth of the Hive | [67] |
| VI. | Early work in the Bee-City | [84] |
| VII. | The Genesis of the Queen | [94] |
| VIII. | The Bride-widow | [117] |
| IX. | The Sovereign Worker-bee | [127] |
| X. | A Romance of Anatomy | [146] |
| XI. | The Mystery of the Swarm | [174] |
| XII. | The Comb-builders | [195] |
| XIII. | “Where the Bee Sucks” | [219] |
| XIV. | The Drone and his Story | [233] |
| XV. | After the Feast | [248] |
| XVI. | The Modern Bee-farm | [257] |
| XVII. | Bee-keeping and the Simple Life | [267] |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| The Comb-builders | Frontispiece |
| FACING PAGE | |
| Moses Rusden’s Bee-book | [28] |
| Butler’s “Bees Madrigall” | [34] |
| John Thorley in his Study | [40] |
| Inverted Straw Hive | [50] |
| An old Sussex Bee-house | [60] |
| Comb-frame from Modern Hive | [72] |
| Winter in the Bee-garden | [86] |
| Drone-brood and Worker-brood | [94] |
| Queen-bee Laving | [106] |
| A Queen-cell | [110] |
| The Honey-bee, in Fact and Fancy | [128] |
| Brood-comb, Showing all Stages of Bee-life | [140] |
| The Bee-nursery | [166] |
| A Swarm in May | [174] |
| A Mammoth Swarm | [178] |
| Hiving the Swarm | [182] |
| The Swarm Hived | [188] |
| Honeycomb Construction | [206] |
| Comb built Upwards | [216] |
| In the Storehouse | [230] |
| Queen-bee in Off-season | [248] |
| Bad Beemanship | [264] |
| A Forest Apiary | [272] |
INTRODUCTION
THE OLDEST CRAFT UNDER THE SUN
One of the oldest and prettiest fables in ancient mythology is that which deals with the origin of the honey-bee. It was to Melissa and her sister Amalthea, the beautiful daughters of the King of Crete, that the god Jupiter was entrusted by his mother Ops, when Saturn, his father—following his custom of devouring his children at birth—sought to make the usual meal of this, his latest offspring.
The story is variously rendered by ancient writers. Some say that bees already existed in the world, and that Amalthea was only a goat, whose milk served to nourish the baby-god, in addition to the honey that Melissa obtained from the wild bees in the cave where Jupiter lay hidden. Another account has it that the bees themselves were drawn to his place of concealment by the noise made by his nurses, who beat continually on brazen pans to keep the sound of his infant lamentations from the ears of his ravening sire. Thenceforward the bees took over the charge of him, bringing him daily rations of honey until he grew up and was able to hold his own in the Olympian theogony. In either case Jupiter showed his gratitude towards his preservers in true celestial fashion. It was a very ancient belief among the earliest writers that, in the single instance of the honey-bee, the ordinary male-and-female principle was abrogated, and that the propagation of the species took place by miraculous means. In explanation of this, we are told it was a special gift from Jupiter in acknowledgment of the unique service rendered him. In one version of the fable, and in the words of a famous bee-master who wrote in 1657, “Jupiter, for so great a benefit, bestowed on his nurses for a reward that they should have young ones, and continue their kind, without wasting themselves in venery.” In the other, and probably much older form of the legend, Melissa, the beautiful Princess of Crete, was herself changed by the god into a bee, with the like immaculate propensities; and thenceforward the work of collecting honey for the food of man—that honey which, down to a very few centuries from the present time, was universally believed to be a miraculous secretion from heaven—was confided to her descendants.
Apart, however, from the old dim tales of ancient mythology, where there is a romance to account for all beginnings of the world and everything upon it, any attempt to trace back the art of bee-keeping to its earliest inception cannot fail to bring us to the conclusion that it is inevitably and literally the oldest craft under the sun. Thousands of years before the Great Pyramid was built, bee-keeping must have been an established and traditional occupation of man. It must have been common knowledge, stamped with the authority of the ages, that a beehive, besides its toiling multitudes, contained a single large ruling bee, divine examplar of royalty; for how else would the bee have been chosen to represent a King in the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols? But it is not only within the limit of historical times, however remote, that evidences of bee-culture, or at least of man’s use of honey and wax in his daily life, are to be found or inferred. So far back as the Bronze Age it is certain that wax was used in casting ornaments and weapons. A model of the implement was first made in some material that would perish under heat. This was imbedded in clay, and the model burnt out, after which the mould thus formed was filled with the molten metal. These models, no doubt, were in many cases carved out of wood; but it is certain that another and more ductile material was often used. Bronze ornaments have been found with thumb-marks upon them, obviously chance impressions on the original model faithfully reproduced. And the substance of these models could hardly have been anything else than beeswax.
But speculation on the probable antiquity of bee-keeping need not stop here. The best authorities estimate that human life has existed on the earth for perhaps a hundred thousand years. The earliest traces of man, far back in the twilight of palæolithic times, reveal him as a hunting and fighting animal, in whom the instinct to cultivate the soil or domesticate the creatures about him had not yet developed. Later on in the Stone Age—but still in infinitely remote times—it is evident that he tamed several creatures, such as the ox, the sheep, and the goat, keeping them in confinement, and killing them for food as he required it, instead of resorting to the old ceaseless roaming after wild game. At this time, too, he took to sowing corn, and even baking or charring some sort of bread. It must be remembered that if a hundred thousand years is to be set down as the limit of man’s life on the earth, probably the development of other living creatures, as well as most forms of vegetable life, took place immeasurably earlier. The chances are that the world of trees and flowering-plants, in which aboriginal man moved, differed in no great degree from the world of green things surrounding human life to-day. It is certain that the apple, pear, raspberry, blackberry, and plum were common fruits of the country-side in the later Stone Age, for seeds of all these have been found in conjunction with neolithic remains. Evidence of the existence of the beech and elm—the latter a famous pollen-yielder—has been discovered at a very much earlier time. All the conditions favourable to insect-life must have been present in the world ages before man appeared in it; and insect-life undoubtedly existed then in a high state of development. It would be as unreasonable, therefore, not to infer that the honey-bee was ready on the earth with her stores of sweet-food for man, as that man did not speedily discover that store, and make it an object of his daily search, just as he went forth daily to hunt and kill four-footed game.