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ON SOME OLD BEE-MASTERS.

THE

HE literature of bees from the time of Aristotle to the present day is a happy hunting-ground for those who take a delight in quaint conceits and absurdities. With Aristotle himself it is difficult to find fault. His chapters on bees are inaccurate, no doubt, when viewed from our standpoint, but they are far more complete and less exaggerated than the pretentious treatises of many who came after; and for two thousand years, to his credit be it said, hardly anything of importance was added to them. With the later classical and mediæval writers who grappled with the subject the case is different. They generally follow Aristotle blindly. Where they venture to differ or to add original matter the effect is not such as to suggest that they took any pains to verify their statements. One may well pause in wonder after reading Virgil's singular warning to bee-keepers against roasting crabs at a fire near a bee-hive! Should anyone in this prying age be curious enough to test its accuracy by experiment he must not be disappointed if he finds that the bees pay very scant attention to his operations. Aelian, describing the discipline of the bee-hive, says that the first time the drones are caught stealing honey they are thrashed moderately (Tepeμévws) by the workers and expelled in disgrace; but if, watching their opportunity, they return again to the feast, they are then stung and slaughtered in earnest. Pliny, whose appetite for unverified facts was particularly keen, remarks that belated bees bivouac upon their backs in order to protect their wings from the dews. "To prevent stings," says a writer in the Geoponica, "take juice of wild mallows, oil, meal of parched fenugreek; rub your face and the naked parts of your body strenuously, and, having swallowed some of it, breathe into the hive three or four times"- —a recipe to which one might aptly apply the remark attributed by Thorley to old Moses Rusden, that it is better to believe the report than try the experiment.

The earliest work on bees extant in English is, I believe, the "Pleasaunt Instruction of the perfite ordering of Bees," by Thomas Hyll, of London, published in 1568 in black letter, a charming

volume, which I once fondly imagined to be original; but I now know that it was translated verbatim (without acknowledgment) from the "Methodus de Apibus" of Georgius Pictorius published some six years earlier. This work follows, in the main, the lines laid down by the classical authors with a few daring additions. For instance: "If any happen to boyle or seeth River Crevisses (or Sea Crabs) near to the Hives, and that the bees feele the savour thereof, they die forthwith." More original but less entertaining is the little black-letter quarto by Edmund Southerne published in 1593. This author is severe on Mr. Hyll for having said that you could get rid of drones by catching one, pulling off his legs and one of his wings, and then putting him back in the hive; and he warmly criticises the theory that "as soone as the Bees perceive it, presently they will fall upon the rest, and so kill them all.” But Southerne himself is far from accurate; and he unfortunately takes great pains to warn his readers against the newfangled ideas of "driving" and "feeding" the bees, which afterwards proved so important.

The earliest English bee-book worthy of serious attention is undoubtedly the "Feminine Monarchie" of Dr. C. Butler (1609). Perhaps the most interesting edition of it is the third, which is printed phonetically. Butler is courageous enough to throw overboard most of the time-honoured extravagancies of the ancients. He speaks of the bee, by the way, as

The little smith of Notingham,

Which doo'th the work that no man can,

quoting from a poem of the period; but why" of Notingham" it is difficult even to guess. For his facts he relies upon observation and experience, and whenever he indulges in conjecture he is careful to say so. The practical instructions as to the hiving of swarms are excellent, and the whole book is written in an easy, attractive style, interspersed here and there with humorous anecdotes. One of these, quoted from "Paulus Jovius" on the authority of Demetrius, a Muscovite ambassador sent to Rome (it is well to give your authorities minutely in such cases), is worth quoting because it appears to be the genuine version of a familiar story to which an American origin has often been falsely ascribed:

A neighbour of mine (saith hee), searching in the woods for Honny, slipt doun into a great hollow tree, and there sunk into a Lake of Honny up to the brest ; where, when he had stuck fast two days, calling and crying out in vain for help (because no body in the mean while came nigh that solitary place), at length, when he was out of all hope of life, he was strangely delivered by the means of a great Bear; which, coming thither about the same business that hee did, and smelling the Honny (sturred with his striving), clambered up to the top of the

tree, and thence began to let himself down backward into it. The man bethinking himself, and knowing that the worst was but death (which in that place he was sure of) beclipt the Bear fast with both his hands about the loins, and witball made an outcrie as loud as he could. The Bear, being thus suddainly affrighted (what with the handling and what with the noise), made up again with all speed possible; the man held, and the Bear pulled, until with main force he had drawn Dun out of the mire: and then, being let go, away he trots, more afcard than hurt, leaving the smeared swain in a joyful fear.

In the century which followed the publication of the "Feminine Monarchie" many books on bees were written, including Swan's "Speculum Mundi" (1655), Purchas' "Theatre of Politicall Flying Insects" (1657), and Worlidge's "Apiarium" (1678); but they add nothing to the natural history of bees and little to the art and practice of bee-keeping. The only material advance was the discovery of the method of tiering hives one above the other, so that the honey in the upper hives (which we now call "supers") could be taken without killing the bees; or, as the patent granted to J. Gedde in 1675 quaintly phrases it, "a way to free the bees from the inconveniences of being destroyed." It was first mentioned in a letter published by S. Hartlib in 1655, and afterwards amplified by Moses Rusden (1679), White (1706), and Dr. Warder of Croydon (1716). The custom of driving and feeding the stocks in autumn grew into favour during the same period.

The meaning of the word "driving" as applied to bees is easily explained. Let us imagine that a common straw hive, full of bees and honeycomb, is turned upside down, and an empty straw hive placed on the top of it. The two together, being placed mouth to mouth, roughly resemble a huge egg. Now let us slightly tilt up the topmost hive (the empty one) so as to give ventilation, and then. begin drumming steadily with a small wooden mallet upon the sides of the lower hive. What happens? Why, the bees desert their combs and walk up steadily in their thousands into the upper hive, until not a single one is left below. The old hive can then be taken away and the honeycomb cut out. Feed the bees liberally in their new hive, and they will soon fill it with fresh combs. Such is "driving"; before its discovery all the bees in a hive had to be killed with sulphur whenever the honey was taken.

In 1712, when the manuscript of Swammerdam's ampler work, written fifty years previously, was lying forgotten in the pigeonholes of a library, Maraldi, the French astronomer and academician, published in the "Recueil de l'Académie" an illustrated essay on bees, only thirty pages in length, but full of new discoveries. Hardly anything escaped his notice that could be seen through a glass panel let into

the wall of a hive. He saw for the first time that the eggs were laid by the queen, and day after day he watched the combs until the larvæ were sealed over and finally the perfect workers or drones emerged. Among other things he saw the celebrated snail which was unlucky enough to creep and intrude and climb into a hive, and which (as everybody knows) was glued to the wall with "propolis," or bee-glue, and so perished. But what especially attracted his attention was the cell-shape. He was the first to demonstrate that the blind end or base of each cell is not a flat wall but a blunt point, consisting of three rhombs, the acute and obtuse angles of which are about 70° and 110° respectively-an arrangement which secures the greatest possible economy of wax in the construction of the comb.

The "Bible of Nature" by Jan Swammerdam (who died in 1680) was unearthed by Boerhaave in 1737, and published in Dutch and Latin. It was not in observing the habits of bees that Swammerdam excelled; what he did do, and with astonishing success, was to dissect them. The dissection of insects was his passion. With the imperfect microscopes of those days he could not have attained any measure of success but for his indomitable perseverance and his unusual manipulative dexterity. When quite a young man he invented the method, now universal, of injecting melted wax into the arteries of dead bodies, and he was the first to show the feasibility of dissecting so minute an object as an insect's leg. How well he did such work may be seen by a glance at his diagrams. "He used to begin working at sunrise," says Boerhaave in Ffloyd's translation, "sitting hatless in the open air, and his head in a manner dissolving into sweat under the ardors of that powerful luminary." He had before him a little brass table furnished with two movable arms, one to hold his lenses and the other his objects. At noon he usually desisted, not from weariness, but because, he said, his sight could not hold out all day for such tiny objects," though as discernible in the post-meridian as they had been in the ante-meridian hours." He often expressed a wish for a year of continuous daylight in which to perfect his investigations, followed by a polar night in which to make his drawings. His work was done, moreover, "amidst a thousand torments and agonies of heart and mind. On the one hand," says Boerhaave, "his genius urged him to examine the miracles of the Great Creator in His natural productions, whilst, on the other, the love of that same all-powerful Being, deeply rooted in his heart, struggled hard to persuade him that God alone and not His creatures was worthy of attention." In other words, he had grave suspicions that the use of the microscope was wicked.

To pry too curiously into the secrets which it revealed was to endeavour to defeat the scheme of creation under which they had been so carefully hidden away. In his perplexity he consulted the famous scapegrace Antoinette de Bourignon, and on that lady's advice decided to abandon his beloved studies.

After Maraldi came the Periclean age of bee-literature; brilliant discoveries followed one another rapidly, paving the way for the immortal masterpiece of François Huber. The elegant memoirs of Réaumur, the Tyndall of apiarians, appeared in 1740. Three years later Maclaurin investigated the mathematics of the cell-shape. In 1760 Schirach, the amiable pastor of Klein Bautzen, observed the astounding fact that an egg which in the ordinary course would produce a worker-bee may by special treatment be made to produce so different a creature as a queen-bee, and expounded as a corollary the method (now in common use) of forming artificial swarms. Few believed him; the famous John Hunter, who in 1792 discovered the bees' wax-pockets, makes very merry at Schirach's expense. About 1765 Riem found in the existence of fertile workers the cause of the phenomenon noticed by Aristotle of the production of drones in a queenless hive.

But the year to be marked with red letters in the chronicles of bee-keeping is 1796, in which blind Huber's "New Observations" first saw the light. Huber invented a hive in narrow segments hinged together, each segment containing a single honeycomb, and the whole so arranged as to open out like the leaves of a book. With this apparatus the clear-seeing blind man verified the discoveries of his predecessors and added many new ones of his own. He investigated the circumstances of the queen bee's bridal; the combats of rival queens; the destruction by the queens of rival cells; the conduct of the workers towards belligerent queens; the stationing of guards at the entrance of the hive; the fact that the reigning queen heads the first swarm; the effect of the size of the cells on the size of their occupants; the manner of building the comb; the ravages of the Death's Head moth; how bees breathe; and how they circulate currents of fresh air in the hive by fanning it with their wings from one to another. And the whole is written in such a style as to make the work a literary treasure as well as a scientific curiosity.

Extensive and wonderful as Huber's discoveries were, the work of his successors in the present century shows how large a field still remained to be explored. Since his time advances have been made which have simply revolutionised the whole art and practice of apiculture. First of these was the invention of the bar-framed hive.

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