Practical Management of Bees.—Among the world of insects the honey-bee stands pre-eminent as the most serviceable to mankind; from the day on which the little labourer leaves its home for the first time in search of food, its mission is undoubtedly useful. Launched upon an unknown world, and guided by unerring instinct to the very flowers it seeks, the bee fertilizes fruit and flowers while winging its happy flight among the blossoms, gathering pollen for the nurslings of its own home and honey for the use of man. Nothing seems to be lost, nor can any part of the bee’s work be accounted labour in vain; the very wax from which the insect builds the store-combs for its food and the cells in which its young are hatched and reared is valuable to mankind in many ways, and is regarded today no less than in the past ages as an important commercial product. The hive bee is, moreover, the only insect known to be capable of domestication, so far as labouring under the direct control of the bee-master is concerned, its habits being admirably adapted for embodying human methods of working for profit in our present-day life.
In dealing with the practical side of apiculture it will not be necessary to do more than mention the salient points to be considered by those desirous of acquiring more complete knowledge of the subject. Authoritative text-books specially written for the guidance of bee-keepers are numerous and cheap, and on no account should any one engage in an attempt to manage bees on modern lines without a careful perusal of one or more of these. Bearing this in mind the reader will understand that so much of the natural history of the honey-bee as is necessary for elucidating the practical part of our subject may be comprised in (1) the life of the insect, (2) its mission in life, and (3) utilizing to the utmost the brief period during which it can labour before being worn out with toil.
| Fig. 24.—Hive bee (Apis mellafica). a, Worker; b, queen; c, drone. |
| (From Cheshire’s Bees and Bee-keeping, Scientific and Practical.) |
A prosperous bee-colony managed on modern lines will in the height of summer consist of three kinds of bees: a queen or mother-bee, a certain number of drones, and from 80,000 to 100,000 workers. With regard to sex, the Sex of bees. queen is a fully-developed female, the drones are males and the workers may be termed neuters or partially developed females. These last possess ovaries like the queen, but shrunken and aborted so as to render the insect normally incapable of egg-production. The relative importance of the three kinds of bees, differs greatly in a degree and in somewhat curious fashion. For instance, the queen (or “king” of the hives as it was termed by our forefathers) is of paramount importance at certain Loss of queens. seasons, her death or disablement during the period when the male element is absent meaning extinction of the whole colony. Fecundation would under such conditions be impossible, and without this the eggs of a resultant queen will produce nothing but drones. During the summer season, however (from May to July), when drones are abundant, the loss of a queen is of comparatively little moment, as the workers can transform eggs (or young larvae not more than three days old), which would in the ordinary course produce worker bees, into fully-developed queens, capable of fulfilling all the maternal duties of a mother-bee. The value of this wonderful provision of nature to the bee-keeper of today may be estimated from the fact that bees managed according to modern methods are necessarily subject to so much manipulating or handling, that fatal accidents are as likely to happen in bee life as among human beings.
Authorities differ with regard to the age during which the queen bee is useful to the bee-keeper who works for profit. Under normal conditions the insect will live for three, four or sometimes five years, but the stimulation given together with the high-pressure system followed in modern bee-management, exhausts the period of her greatest fecundity in two years, so that queens are usually superseded after their second season has expired and egg-production gradually decreases. This can hardly cause wonder if it is borne in mind that for many weeks during the height of the season a prolific queen will deposit eggs at the rate of from two to three thousand every twenty-four hours.
Drones (or male bees) are more or less numerous in hives according to the skill of the bee-keeper in limiting their production. It is admitted by those best able to judge that the proportion of about a hundred drones in each The drone. hive is conducive to the prosperity of the colony, but beyond that number they are worse than useless, being non-producers and heavy consumers. Thus in times of scarcity, which are not infrequent during the early part of the season, they become a heavy tax upon the food-supply of the colony at the critical period when brood-rearing is accelerated by an abundance of stores, while shortness of food means a falling-off in egg-production. The modern bee-keeper, therefore, allows just so much drone comb in the hive as will produce a sufficient number of drones to ensure queen-mating, while affording to the bees the satisfaction of dwelling in a home equipped according to natural conditions, and containing all the elements necessary to bee-life. The action of the bees themselves makes this point clear, for when the season of mating is past the drone is no longer needed, the providing of winter stores taking first place in the economy of the hive. So long as honey is being gathered in plenty drones are tolerated, but no sooner does the honey harvest show signs of being over than they are mercilessly killed and cast out of the hive by the workers, after a brief idle life of about four months’ duration. Thus the “lazy yawning drone,” as Shakespeare puts it, has a short shrift when his usefulness to the community is ended.
Finally we have the aptly named worker-bee, on whom devolves the entire labour of the colony. The worker-bee is incapable of egg-production and can therefore take no part in the perpetuation of its species, so that individually its The worker-bee. value to the community is infinitesimal. Yet it forms an item in a commonwealth, the members of which are in all respects equally well endowed. They are in turn skilled scientists, architects, builders, artisans, labourers and even scavengers; but collectively they are the rulers on whom the colony depends for the wonderful condition of law and order which has made the bee-community a model of good government for all mankind. Then so far as regards longevity, the period Longevity in bees. of a worker-bee’s existence is not measured by numbering its days but simply by wear and tear, the marvellous intricacy and wonderful perfection of its framework being so delicate in construction that after six or seven weeks of strenuous toil, such as the bee undergoes in summer time, the little creature’s labour is ended by a natural death. On the other hand, worker-bees hatched in the autumn will seven months later be strong with the vigour of lusty youth, able to take their full share in the labour of the hive for six weeks or more in the early spring, which is the most critical period in the colony’s existence; hence the value to the apiarist of bees hatched in the autumn.
The mission of the worker-bee is work; not so much for itself as for the younger members of the community to which it belongs. We cannot claim for it the virtue of strict honesty with regard to the stranger, but for its own “kith and kin” it is a model of socialism in an ideal form, possessing nothing of its own yet toiling unceasingly for the good of all. The increasing warmth of each recurring spring finds the bee awake, and full of eagerness to be up and doing; its sole mission being apparently to accomplish as much work as possible while life lasts. The earliest pollen is sought out from far and near, and has its immediate effect upon the mother bee of the colony. If healthy and young she begins egg-laying at once, and brood-rearing proceeds at an ever-increasing rate as each week passes, until the hive is brimming over with bees in time for the first honey flow. Then comes the almost human foresight with which the bee prevents the inevitable chaos created by an overcrowded home. There is no cell-room either for storing the abundant supply of food constantly being brought in, or for the thousands of eggs which a prolific queen will produce daily as a consequence of general prosperity; therefore unless help comes from without an exodus is prepared for, and what is known as “swarming” takes place.
It would be difficult to imagine anything more exhilarating to a beginner in bee-keeping than the sight of his first hive in the act of swarming. The little creatures are seen rushing in frantic haste from the hive like a living Swarming. stream, filling the air with ever-increasing thousands of bees on the wing. The incoming workers returning pollen-laden from the fields, carried away by the prevailing excitement, do not stop to unload their burdens in the old home, but join the enthusiastic emigrants, tumbling over each other pell-mell in the outrush; among them the queen of the colony will in due course have taken her place, bound like her children for a new home. It soon becomes apparent to the onlooker when the queen has joined the flying multitude of bees in the air, for they are seen to be closing up their ranks, and in a few moments begin to form a solid cluster, usually on the branch of a small tree or bush close to the ground. When this stage of swarming is reached the bee-keeper has but to take his hiving skep, hold it under the swarm, and shake the bees into it, preparatory to transferring Hiving swarms. them into a frame-hive already prepared for their reception. The process of hiving a swarm is very simple and need not occupy many moments of time under ordinary conditions, but so many unlooked-for contingencies may arise that the apiarist would do well to prepare himself beforehand by carefully reading the directions in his text-book.
| Fig. 25.—Honeycomb, Metamorphoses of the Honey Bee. |
| (From Cheshire’s Bees and Bee-keeping, Scientific and Practical.) |