The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

And yet there is no time of year when the honey-bee is so little inclined to molest her human fellow-creatures as this. So long as the honey-weather holds—the warm nights when the nectar is secreted, and the rainless days when it can be gathered—she can hardly be induced to attack, even if her home is being turned inside out, and the sudden sunlight riddling its darkness through and through.

Until within comparatively recent years it was universally believed that honey was a pure, untouched secretion from the flowers; and that beyond gathering and storing it the bee had no part in its production. This idea, however, is a wholly mistaken one. Honey is a manufactured article, and differs in almost every way from the raw juices obtained from the various flower-crops. The nectar of flowers, before collection by the bee, seems to have hardly any of the constituents of ripe honey. Three-quarters of its bulk consists of plain water, in which about 20 per cent. of cane-sugar is dissolved, the rest being made up of essential oils and gums, which give it its distinctive flavour. But mature honey contains very little water, certainly never more than a sixth part of its bulk. Its sugar is almost entirely grape-sugar. It is decidedly acid, while the nectar is always neutral. And the oils and aromatic principles of the flower juices are matured and developed into the well-known honey flavour, which is like nothing else in the world.

It is certain that the process of manufacture begins directly the bee draws the nectar from the flower-cup. As the liquid passes into the honey-sac it is mingled with the acid secretion from the gland at the base of the tongue. When the bee reaches the hive she does not pour her burden direct into the cells, but passes it on to one of the house-bees, who conveys it to the honey-vats. It is even probable that the nectar is transferred a second time before it reaches the cell, although this point is still undecided. The effect of such transference is to add more acid properties to the original juice.

The honey seems to undergo a regular brewing process within the hive. It is kept at a temperature of about 80° or 85°, and it is then that the surplus water passes off into vapour. In this way the raw nectar loses at least two-thirds of its natural bulk before it is finally converted into honey. It is said that at the last moment, just before each cell is stopped with an impervious covering of wax, the bee turns herself about, and injects into the honey a drop of the poison from her sting; but there seems to be not the slightest evidence in support of this. The contents of the poison-sac are, it is true, mainly formic acid, which is a strong preservative; and undoubtedly traces of formic acid are to be found in all honeys. It has been, however, conclusively proved that this acid finds its way into the honey from the glandular system of the bee, and not through its sting.

The industry of the bee in nectar-gathering has always been a stock subject for wonder, and it is commonly supposed that she is born with full instinctive capabilities for her task. A little observation, however, soon tends to upset this theory. The work of foraging has to be learnt step by step, like every other species of skilled work in hive-life. The young bee, setting out on her first flight, has all the will to do well, and her imitative faculty is strongly developed; but she seems to have very little else. Her first experiences are a succession of blunders. She appears not to know for certain where to look for the coveted sweets, and can be seen industriously searching the most unlikely places—crevices in walls, tufts of grass, or the leaves of a plant instead of its flowers. The fact that the nectar is hidden deep down in the cup of the flower, beyond its pollen-bearing mechanism, seems to dawn upon her only after much thought and many fruitless essays.

It has been proved that bees will go as far as two or even three miles in their foraging journeys. The distance seems to vary according to the nature of the country. Bees in hilly districts appear to venture only short distances from home, while in flat country the foraging flights are more extended. A bee-line has become proverbial for a straight course, but it is doubtful whether the bee ever makes a perfectly direct flight from point to point. The truth seems to be that there are well-defined air-paths out from and home to every bee-garden, and that these are continually thronged with bees going and returning throughout the working hours of the day. These aërial thoroughfares lie high above all but the tallest obstacles, so high indeed that the keenest sight will reveal nothing. Only the busy song of the travellers can be heard, like a river of music, far overhead.

In the South Down country, where the isolated farms are each surrounded with their compact acreage of blossoming sheep-feed, and there is nothing but empty miles of close-cropped turf between, these bee-roads in the air can be easily found and studied. Walking over the springy, undulating grass in the quiet of a summer’s morning, a faint, far-off note breaks suddenly upon you like the twang of a harp-string high up in the blue. A step or two onward and you lose it; retracing your path, it peals out again. You can see nothing, strain your eyes as you will; but its cause is evident, and with a little trying you can presently make out the main direction of the flight, and see down in the hollow far below, the huddled roofs of a farmstead with a patchwork of fields about it, white with clover, or rose-red with sainfoin in fullest bloom.

Perhaps there is no honey in the world so fine as that to be obtained from these solitary Downland settlements. With the ordinary consumer honey is merely honey, and there is an end of the matter. But the beeman knows that the quality of honey varies as greatly as that of wine. He will tell you at first taste the crop from which it is gathered, whether it has one source or many, whether it is all flower-essence, or has been contaminated by the hateful honeydew, which is not honey at all. Down in the lowlands, except at certain rare seasons when only one crop is in flower, it is next to impossible to get honey absolutely from a single source. But here on the hills the bees are not tempted by glowing gardens with their feeble, washy sweets; nor are they led aside by the coarse-natured privet, or horse-chestnut, or sunflower. There is only one trencher to their banquet, but this is a vast, illimitable one. They have nothing to do but to wend out and home all day long between their hives and a single field.

It is difficult to gauge with anything like approximate truth the amount of honey that one flowering crop will yield. But probably, when all conditions are most favourable, every acre of Dutch clover will produce about five pounds of pure honey for each day it is left standing in full bloom. The nectar is obviously secreted by the flower as an attraction to the bee, who, blundering into it with her pollen-smothered body, unconsciously effects its fertilisation. Directly this object is gained, the flow of nectar in each particular floret appears to cease, and the bee passes it by.

The student of old books on apiculture is often surprised to read so much in praise of honeydew, while in the modern bee-garden he hears of it nothing but hearty condemnation. He is told that directly the bees begin to gather honeydew the store-racks must be removed from the hives, or the good honey will be ruined both in colour and flavour. He is shown some dark, ill-looking, watery stuff carefully sealed up by the bees, and is informed that it is nearly all honeydew. But, he asks himself, can this be the same thing about which the old masters were led into such ardent eulogy? The truth is that when ancient and mediæval writers spoke of honeydew, they used the word as a general term for all that the bees gathered. Honey was all a dew, divinely rained down from the skies; and it is entirely of a piece with the all but universal lack of bee-knowledge down almost to the beginning of the nineteenth century, that so few should have guessed that the flowers themselves had anything to do with the matter. Virgil and the rest of the classics held absolute sway over all minds pretending to the least culture, and even the naturalists seem to have studied the wild life around them with no other object than to force facts into line with ancient poetic fantasies. The old writers explained the varying qualities of honey as being due to the influence of whatever stars happened to be in the ascendant at the time of its gathering, and the honey was good or bad according to whether this was favourable or unfavourable.