The Lore of the Honey-Bee

by Tickner Edwardes

Doctors are continually finding some new virtue in honey. Its gently regulating action has been long known, and there is good authority for stating that there is not an organ in the human body which does not benefit from its habitual use. In all wasting diseases, and triumphantly in consumption, it will prevail as an up-builder when everything else fails. There is no doubt at all that cases of consumption have been entirely cured by a liberal diet of honey; and, notoriously, honey is the main ingredient in nearly all patent medicines for diseases of the chest and throat. Therapeutic hints from laymen are generally looked upon askance by medical men—at least, by those of the old-fashioned type; yet, on the chance that this page may come under the eye of some of the more elastic-minded, the thing may be hazarded. There are many who believe in it, and with good reason, as a sovereign specific where the disease is a wasting one. It is nothing else than the once famous Athole Brose, which, as all Scottish bee-keepers know, consist of equal parts of good thick honey, preferably from ling-heather, and of cream, and of mature Scotch whisky from the pot-still. Little and often is the rule for its administration, but, unlike most old wife’s remedies, faith has nothing to do with its wonder-working. Scepticism is a soil in which it seems to flourish as well as any.

The man of business, resolved to take up bee-keeping as a livelihood, must, at the outset, decide on what scale he will carry the matter through. There are two aspects of the thing, each more alluring than the other, according to the temperament and point of view. There is the Simple Life and the bee-garden—a life spent in the green quiet of an English village, within reach of a market town, where the produce of the hives may be disposed of. And there is the greater enterprise, the foundation of a bee-farm on an extensive scale, and on the most approved scientific principles, where the object is to supply the great central markets at a distance rather than the immediate local needs.

In the establishment of a bee-farm the first care must be the choice of a suitable district. The nature of the surrounding country must largely govern the systems on which the farm can be most profitably worked. The first maxim in successful beemanship is to get all hives filled to the brim with worker-bees by the time the great honey-flow sets in. This time, however, varies according to the district. In the orchard-country we need bees early; in heather-districts we want them late. In south-west England, where the country is half fruit-ground and half moorland, the hives must be huge in population both late and early. But where the bee-keeper follows the sheep-farmer—and there is no better guide to honey than the sheep—his true policy is to work his colonies slowly and steadily up to their greatest strength by the time the main feed-crops come into blossom, which is seldom before the middle of May. And all these considerations land us on the brink of a very vexed question in modern bee-craft—whether bees should be artificially fed, and if so, how and when?

If only the purest cane-sugar is used, and the syrup well boiled and never burnt, there is nothing to say against the practice on the score of harm to the stocks. Where early bees are wanted, it is absolutely necessary to give them a continuous supply of sugar-syrup from the first moment that breeding commences in the hives. Chemically, the sweet constituent in nectar is almost identical with that from the sugar-cane; and sugar-syrup has this advantage over honey given—that it more nearly simulates the natural flow. The bees responsible for the nursery-work in the hive and the regulation of the queen’s fecundity, are young bees that have never yet flown. They can, therefore, only judge of the progress of the season by the amount of nectar and pollen coming into the hive. Where this is steadily increasing day by day—and it is this regular natural progress in prosperity which the bee-keeper must strive to imitate in artificial feeding—the nurse-bees gain confidence, and brood-raising forges rapidly ahead.

But sugar-syrup and pea-flour are not natural foods for bees, and there is little doubt that a prolonged course of such diet tends to lower the tone and stamina of the race, and thus may prepare the way for disease. The golden rule in the matter seems to be that artificial feeding should be resorted to only where strength of stocks is necessary, to secure the harvest, or where actual starvation threatens. In purely heather-districts, when the big population is quite early enough if it is to hand in late June, nothing short of imminent starvation should induce the bee-master to give artificial, and therefore unavoidably inferior, food. In sheep-country the same rule holds. Except in the most unfavourable years, a hive, headed by a young and vigorous queen, can be relied upon to get itself into the finest fettle by the time the main crops are ready for exploitation. In this case the beeman has only to make certain from time to time that no stock is in absolute want of the ordinary means of subsistence.

But in those warm, favoured regions of the south-west, the lands of the apple-blossom and the heather, where there is a very early and a very late harvest to be gathered, a different system must be pursued. Here we touch on the second grand principle of successful bee-keeping—the necessity for having in all hives only the most prolific mother-bees. For profitable honey-getting a queen should seldom be kept beyond her second year. After that she is usually of little account, and should be superseded, either by the bee-master or the bees. But where a queen has been over-stimulated by feeding to raise an immense population in the spring of the year, she is rarely capable of another supreme effort in the autumn. The best policy, therefore, if the heather-harvest is an important one, is to remove the old queens as soon as the spring work is over, and to substitute for them queens that are in their best season, but at the beginning of their resources instead of at the end. In this way another huge army of workers is soon born to the hive, and the double harvest is secured.

On the question of the best hive to use in commercial bee-keeping, on either a large or small scale, it is hard to particularise. Generalisation, however, is not difficult here. Every bee-master has his own ideas as to details, but all are happily agreed on the main constructive principles. Experience has fairly well decided that a good queen, under the modern system of intensive culture, will require for her brood a comb-surface of about 1,800 square inches. A brood-nest of smaller capacity than this is liable to cramp her operations at their highest, and anything in excess of it will simply mean so much new honey lost to the super-chambers, where alone the bee-master requires it. Honey stored in the brood-nest, except during the off-season, is loss instead of gain. The best hive, therefore, will contain just as many brood-combs in movable frames as will ensure the right capacity; and all comb-frames throughout the bee-farm must be of the same size, so that they will be strictly interchangeable among the various hives. This is a vital point in successful bee-culture, because it enables the master not only to equalise the strength of his stocks by transferring combs of hatching brood from one to the other; but he can also give to penurious stocks frames of sealed honey from the abundance of their neighbours, and he can unite the weak colonies, thus rendering all strong.

For the rest, the hives must be so made that heat will be perfectly retained in the cold season, and as perfectly excluded during the sultriest time of year. Double walls round the brood-chamber are a necessity in the changeable British climate, where chilly days are always probable during ten months out of the twelve.

As well as honey-production, the bee-farmer will find an equal source of profit in the production of wax. Just as there is nothing like leather, beeswax holds its own as a marketable commodity in spite of paraffin substitutes. But if it is almost universally degraded by adulteration, the fault lies with the beemen, who have never seriously attempted to meet the demand for it. Wax-production on a large scale is perfectly feasible, and there is little doubt that it could be developed into an important British industry, as it used to be in mediæval days. Yet these are times of revolution: the honey-bee may yet find herself entirely restored to her old national avocation—of bringing light to our darkness, and to our bodies one of the best and purest of foods.