and foolish. It is evident that if a colony of bees can break off work right at the height of the season, and start the world all over again by building expensive new combs, they have a great deal of energy to spare. And if this surplus energy were kept at home and devoted wholly to honey making it would bring large results. Fifty to a hundred pounds of honey would be gained by each colony- and in some localities a much greater amount; and the beekeeper could carry away this much without taking any that the bees would need for their proper support. they could if they would only listen to reason as the beekeeper sees it just as well stay at home and keep on making honey. The one brood chamber would accommodate them all; and that surplus energy which they use for colonizing could be turned into surplus honey in the upper stories. It is one big swarm with a single queen, not two small swarms with two queens, that can find time to make honey for man's benefit. What most people do not know, though it is a main factor in the beekeeper's calculations, is that honeycomb is not a perishing and temporary That it is quite unnecessary for bees thing. The same comb serves the to leave the home hive can be shown by purposes of the bees year after year; a simple example in arithmetic. As the it has been known to be good at the end queen lays a certain maximum number of twenty years and even longer. The of eggs a day about three thousand house of the bee is a permanent insti-and it takes twenty-one days for a tution, intended to serve future generWorker to hatch and come to maturity, ations and hold the honey of many and the life of a worker in the busy summers in the place in which it was season is about five weeks, it is plain founded. It is only the inhabitants that the size of a swarm is limited and that change. And right here is where fixed by these figures. The bees do not the bee's conduct seems most outraswarm because they are crowded out geous to the mind of the bee man. The by a continual increase in numbers. queen, going her spiral round from cell Moreover, the size of the lower story to cell, needs only a certain area of or brood chamber has been calculated comb. After twenty-one days, at three with these figures in mind, remember- thousand or more eggs a day, her brood ing that every square inch of comb con- begins to hatch, and the empty cells tains fifty-five cells twenty-seven to are ready for her to use over again. twenty-eight on each side. As the hive These cells, together with enough cells builder has computed these measure- to hold the current and winter supplies, ments with fair accuracy in the brood would serve for all time; and thus the chamber, and as the beekeeper is quite bees, having never any comb to build willing to furnish them with new upper for themselves, could spend their whole stories as fast as they fill them, it is superfluity of time in putting honey in plain that bees can have no real excuse the upper story for the use of man. for acting as they do. Their custom of It is perfectly logical, entirely natural having but one queen, whose capacity a consummation devoutly to be is limited and whose laying season is wished! short, together with the high rate of mortality among her offspring, makes a set of conditions which keep the possible size of a swarm within bounds and make it somewhat standard. Hence The attitude of the beekeeper as he stands, pencil in hand, and contemplates the promising facts and figures, is quite understandable. It is plain that if we are to have honey in any quantity we must devise some way of keeping the whole swarm in one house. We must checkmate nature in that instinct to start a new colony. The surplus of energy that is put into such enterprises is just the energy we need to supply us with honey. III or a to close. It is a labor-saving system of great importance to the managers of bees. The second problem, that of preventing the queen from laying male eggs and producing drones, is accomplished by means of sheets of wax run through a pair of engraved rollers working like a wash wringer. Bees build their cells of two sizes, those intended Strange as it would seem to a bee for the reception of male eggs being one keeper of a hundred years ago, thousand years ago, for that matter, all these things are quite easily done. In all those little white boxes that stand in rows in any farmer's yard — boxes of white magic that are not half as simple as they look it is a matter of everyday practice. And the way it is done is simple enough in the telling. In the production of extracted honey, the problem of relieving the bees of the work of wax making is solved by movable combs. The bees build their combs in large, light wooden frames, which are free to be lifted out of the hive and as freely returned to it. Upon being removed full of ripe honey, a long knife is drawn across the surface of the comb so as to cut off the capping of the cells, thus releasing the warm and quite liquid honey. A centrifugal machine, whirling the comb rapidly inside a metal container, causes every last drop of honey to fly out of the cells and leaves them fairly clean; after which the frames of uninjured comb, of which there are usually ten to a story, are put back in the hive to be refilled by the bees. There is thus no delay in building cells to accommodate the swift bounty of summer. There is no hanging in festoons from the roof of the hive to consume honey and produce wax. The bees instead hurry in more and more of the golden hoard while the nectaries are flowing and before a change of weather causes them fourth of an inch across, while those that are to receive worker eggs measure one fifth of an inch. The queen, going her rounds from cell to cell as methodically as a farmer dropping corn in rows, lays eggs that are very small, first thrusting her head into each cell as if to inspect its condition. When she comes to one of these larger cells she will deposit a male egg in it, while one of the other cells, intended to hold a bee of the opposite or worker sex, will receive an egg such as its size calls for. The queen, by a miraculous-seeming provision of nature, has power to control the sex of the eggs she lays. Man has taken advantage of this state of affairs by engraving on the metal rolls which make the sheets of wax the outline of cells of the worker variety. A sheet of this comb 'foundation' is fastened into the frame into which comb is to be built; and the bees, willingly making use of what man has begun for them, rapidly draw out the wax into cells which produce nothing but worker bees. When comb gets old or broken in handling, or is damaged in the centrifugal machine, it is renewed in this way; and the beekeeper has always a spare stock of comb large enough to meet the demands of the busiest season. And he uses the same comb over and over, catching the honey crop as fast as the bees bring it in. While this is the practice in producing extracted honey, comb honey is in a somewhat different case, for here the customer insists upon having the whole product. As the same comb cannot be used over and over, the foundation machine comes into use each time a crop is taken off. The middle wall, or midriff, of each little section of comb honey is produced by the rollers from wax on hand. This is fitted into the one-pound basswood sections, and the bees rapidly draw out the cells. While this does not eventually save the bees the labor of making wax to replace the wax that is sold with the honey, it greatly lessens the work they need to do in building the comb. The wax on hand may be from extractor combs that have become damaged or broken down. Thirdly, and I hope my readers remember that this is going to be the story of a preacher, we have to consider the swarming problem. If we are going to have honey for the table, the bees must not waste their time going away to build new mansions of wax. Their instinct to do this is accordingly frustrated by taking advantage of a still stronger commandment in the bee world. Under no circumstances will a swarm of bees strike out for a new location without being sure that the queen is with them. If anything has happened to prevent her coming, they soon know it; and in that case they give up their colonizing plans for the time being and return to the hive. The sagacious beekeeper turns this detail to his own advantage by clipping off a wing of the queen bee in each hive. And then he takes a more fundamental precaution. A swarm of bees will not leave a hive without taking measures to provide a new queen for the ones who stay behind and carry on the business of the old home. When they intend leaving, they build large queen cells and start a number of royal babies that are duly sealed up and left to develop; and if all VOL. 149-NO. 1 their plans go well, though much depends upon the weather, they may time this queen hatching so that the queen-to-be would ordinarily make her appearance about a week after the swarm has departed. The beekeeper, knowing this, keeps track of his bees' intentions by going through the hives at regular intervals; and he takes pains to destroy all royal progeny in its cradle and to damage materially any queen cells that may have been started. As there may be as many as a hundred thousand bees in a hive, it might seem an impossible task to pick out the queen from such a throng in every colony. It must be kept in mind that the combs in the modern hive are movable. It would indeed be impossible were it not that the combs may be taken out, one after another, and held up to the light of day. The queen, surrounded by her royal escort, with their heads all toward her, is like a marked paragraph in a book; and she is soon picked out from the rest of the text. And then, a wing being snipped off, she will never make a success of any effort to abscond with the swarm. This treatment will not, however, keep her from trying when the time comes. To prevent all such efforts upon the part of the swarm, the combs must all be gone over once in ten days a considerable task for a man with many colonies. In case he neglects, or is too busy, the wingless queen holds the situation in control for him. While the truant swarm is hanging in a seething mass on the limb of a near-by bush or tree, the queen will be found in the grass at the front of the hive making lopsided efforts to fly. The beekeeper puts her back in the hive in a little cage; and now he may rest assured that the congregation temporarily holding conference on the limb of the tree will make a change in its plans and return to the hive. It is not really the same hive, however, for the beekeeper has been shrewd enough to put in the place of the old hive one whose interior has been made more inviting by means of some empty comb all ready for the queen to fill with brood. And then the bees in the other hive, flying afield and coming back with their loads, will enter this one, thinking it is the one they have been using because it occupies the same location; and thus all the working bees of the original swarm are brought together again under one queen. The result is that while they may think they have successfully swarmed, being at work in a different interior, they have not swarmed at all, because they have not succeeded in dividing their forces. The beekeeper has had his way; and now they are not going to waste their time in colonizing and building new comb and raising drones. It is not the mere absconding of the swarm that the beekeeper objects to; it is this division of forces which reduces the honey output and turns the bees' energies in a direction that is useless to him. IV There is a great deal of human nature as well as bee nature to be studied in the bee yard. In former days it was thought that if the owner died, and the bees were not formally notified of the fact, they would stop making honey. Consequently it was the custom to hang black crape on every hive while someone went through the operation of telling the bees.' Now that science has taken the place of superstition, the beekeeper does not tell them anything; he fools them. Up to the year 1852, when Langstroth invented the movable-comb hive, the 'brimstone pit' for suffocating the bees in the fall was a regular part of the apiary. According to that old world and world-old method, beekeeping was a very simple procedure. All you had to do was to get a swarm of bees into a box, a hollow log, or a 'skep' of twisted straw, and leave them to their own devices. their own devices. They could be depended upon to clean house, fill all cracks with a cement of wax and resin, repair any imperfections, and set to work in accordance with the ancient laws of the craft. If you wanted to get any honey without killing them you would have to turn the hive upside down and dig right into the comb; and if you expected to keep them over winter you would be careful not to take much, else they would not have a surplus sufficient to last them. Naturally, the usual custom was to wait till autumn, when the crop was all in, and rob them outright. And, as this was to be the end of the bees, the hives were kept for a while in the fumes of burning sulphur to make the operation easier. This method brought greater immediate reward, but it was destructive of the source of profit. And besides, the quality of the honey, some of it stored in cells adjacent to dead brood or bitter and often poisonous pollen, was not likely to be of the best. Sometimes, in order to save it all, the comb would be melted and the honey heated till the foreign matter rose in a scum which could be skimmed off; and this was likely to result in an unsavory mess. As knowledge of the bee became more scientific, the invention of hives began. Inventors in England, France, America, and Russia produced hives with ingenious features, but they all ended int failure. They were not founded on a close study of the bee. And then Pastor Langstroth, a most interesting and lovable man who was minister of a Congregational church in Philadelphia, made the discovery regarding bee nature which was to esin et to cient ge you side and Over t to atu till and Was ives tion me e of the pred tter be have world-wide effect and change the methods of beekeeping for all time. His object was to make a movablecomb hive. But, while this is easily said, it was not easily done; and the more one studies the habits of bees, the more impossible it appears. It is bee nature, whether in a hollow log or a home of planed pine, to give the interior a coat of varnish, use propolis freely, buttress the combs securely to the roof or sides, and build cells in any available space. In this view of affairs, any expectation that 'removable' frames could be put in a hive and remain movable after the bees had set to work on them would seem doomed to disappointment. A little experiment or two would soon show such a scheme to be impractical and foolish. One might as well expect bees to alter their whole nature as to think that they would not fasten these frames to the wall of the hive. But Langstroth had long loved to work with bees; and he made a discovery. His discovery, as we have already intimated, had to do with a bee's policy, or mental attitude, toward openings of a certain width inside the hive. This policy manifests itself as follows. If the bee finds in the hive a passageway of a width between three sixteenths and three eighths of an inch, she will not fill it with comb or glue it up with propolis, but will keep it as a space to be used in passing to and fro. If the opening is less than three sixteenths of an inch, she regards it as a crack or flaw which needs to be varnished over and filled with propolis. If it is more than three eighths of an inch, she regards it as room in which cells may be built. But anything between these measurements the bee seems to look upon as a sailor does 'gangway' a place to be kept clear. While these measurements represent the extremes that are allowable, prac tice has shown that results are surest with openings not more than five sixteenths or less than one quarter of an inch. This measurement, now standard, has become known as the bee space. The Langstroth hive was built to take advantage of this point in bee nature, the movable frames being made of such a size that there would be just a bee space between the ends of the frames and the walls of the hive; and the same spacing was provided for between the tops of the frames in a lower story and the bottoms of the frames in a story above. In short, there must be no space in the hive after the frames have been filled with comb that does not correspond with this measurement which the bee recognizes and respects. But, as bees work back-to-back on the surfaces of the adjacent combs, there will here need to be a double spacing. Comb is about an inch thick, and so the beekeeper will space his frames so that when the comb is built out to its natural depth the proper back-to-back spacing will be left between them. The whole result of this science of spacing in connection with a movablecomb and top-opening hive is that one story may be lifted freely off another, enabling the beekeeper to take away his crop of honey quite separate from that which belongs to the bees; and the combs in the brood chamber may be taken out and freely manipulated, thus creating conditions which will cause a honey crop many times larger than could be expected under natural conditions. The modern beehive, invented in America, is very American in its nature. It is efficient. It adopts the best methods for quantity production. It surpasses anything of the kind ever invented in Europe. No bee of ancient Greece or Egypt, or even the early Victorian era, could hold a candle for efficiency to the modern, American, fully industrialized bee. Europeans |