The United States Department of Agriculture, in one of its "Farmer's Bulletins," under the heading, "How to Avoid Stings," says, "First, by having gentle bees." At the time I first read this I thought they should have completed the advice by adding "and extract their stings;" but I find on investigation that the subject of gentle bees, is no light matter to the bee-keeper, and that my idea that "a bee is a bee and hence entitled to all the room he requires" does not hold good; that a bee-keeper when purchasing a colony of bees of any species not well known to him will ask if they are gentle in the same tone he would use if he were inquiring about a horse.
Bees seem to do well wherever there are flowers enough to furnish them with food, and are kept for pleasure and profit in all parts of our country. A small plot of ground is devoted to bees by the farmer, a village lot is often filled with hives, and even in our larger cities, especially in New York, Chicago, and Cincinnati, if not in the gardens or on the lawns, they may be found well established on the house-tops, as many as thirty or forty colonies being found on a single roof. They can usually find enough food in and around a city to keep themselves busy without making long excursions; in fact, it sometimes happens that they find more abundant pasturage in a city than they would in the open country, especially where there are large parks and gardens or where the linden (basswood) trees have been set out in any considerable quantities. Sweet clover also sometimes overruns a neglected garden or vacant lot and furnishes a rich field for the city-bred honey-bee.
In Egypt bees are transported on hive-boats from place to place along the Nile according to the succession of flowers. The custom also prevails in Persia, Asia Minor and Greece. In Scotland the same method is used while the heather is in bloom and in Poland bees are transferred back and forth between summer pastures and winter quarters.
A few years ago a floating bee house was constructed on the Mississippi river large enough to carry two thousand colonies. It was designed to be towed up the river from Louisiana to Minnesota, keeping pace with the blossoming of the flowers and then drop back down the river to the sunny South before cold weather should set in in the fall. Honey-bee ships have also been talked of which could carry bees to the West Indies to cruise for honey during the winter.
The bee is not fastidious, but will live in any kind of clean box or barrel that may be provided for its use, hence it sometimes lives in queer places. A swarm escaping will generally make its home in a hollow tree or in a fissure of some large rock. The ancient English hives were generally made of baskets of unpeeled willow. Cork hives are in use in some parts of Europe, and earthenware hives are in use in Greece and Turkey. Glass hives are mentioned as far back as the year 1665. In 1792 movable-comb hives were invented and in the century following more than eight hundred patents were granted on hives in the United States.
Bee products form an important item of income in the United States, more than two billion pounds of honey and wax being produced in a single season. When we consider that this appalling amount of sweetness is gathered a drop here and a drop there it leads us to figures too large to be comprehended.
In considering the value of bees we must by no means think of honey as their sole product, as beeswax is an important article. After the honey has been extracted from the comb the latter is mixed with water and boiled down and run into firm yellow cakes, from which the color disappears if exposed for a certain length of time to the air. Thin slices are exposed until thoroughly bleached, when it is again melted and run into cakes, and is then known as the white wax of commerce. Before oil lamps came into use large quantities of this white wax were used in the manufacture of candles, which made the best light then known, as they burned better than tallow candles and without the smoke or odor which made the tallow article objectionable. The advent of the oil-lamp, the gas jet, and the electric light have practically disposed of its usefulness in that direction, except in devotional exercises, although colored tapers made of white wax are now used for decorative purposes, especially during the holiday season, when numbers of them are used to light our Christmas trees. White wax is also used extensively for making ornamental objects such as models of fruits and flowers. Whole plants are sometimes reproduced and models of various vegetable and animal products are reproduced in colored wax and used for educational or museum purposes. The anatomist finds it of great value in reproducing the normal and diseased structures of the human form. No doubt the original wax works of Mrs. Jarley, made famous by Dickens in "The Old Curiosity Shop," were a collection of wax images made from the product of the honey-bee.
Metheglin is a drink made from honey, and is consumed largely in some parts of the world. It is the nectar which the ancient Scandinavian expected to sip in paradise, using skulls of his enemies as goblets.
The East Indies and the Philippine Islands seem to be under special obligations to astonish the world in everything, and in order to keep pace with their reputations have produced honey-bees of three sizes, one of which is the smallest honey-bee known, and another the largest. The smaller variety is so diminutive that one square inch of comb contains one hundred cells on each side; the entire comb, as it hangs from the twig of a small tree or bush, is only about the size of a man's hand. The workers are a little longer, but somewhat more slender than our common house-fly, and are blue-black in color, with the exception of the anterior third of the abdomen, which is bright orange.
The giant East Indian honey-bee, which is probably identical with the giant of the Philippines, is the largest known species of the genus. They are about one-third larger than our common bee and build huge combs of very pure wax which are attached to overhanging ledges of rock or to the limbs of large trees. These combs are often five or six feet in length, three or four feet in width and from one and one-half to six inches in thickness. The amount of honey that they gather in the course of a season is enormous and it has been suggested that if introduced into this country they might be of immense value as they would doubtless visit mainly the plants which our honey-bees could not well gather from, such as red-clover, and thus increase the amount of clover seed as well as the quantity of honey already produced. Up to date, however, it is not proven that they will live in hives or that they can live at all in this climate; the latter being regarded as extremely doubtful by some of our best informed bee-men.