BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
The above extract is from the " Bee Preserver," by Jonas de Gelien, Edinburgh, 1829, page 56; an author to whom I can never sufficiently acknowledge my obligations.I have learnt more from him than from any other writer--though not so much as from my masters, the bees. He studied their habits sixty-four years, and communicated the result of his observations, in extreme old age, as a duty which he owed to the world before leaving it. I have tested most of his observations, and repeated his experiments, and I never found one of them to fail. From him I learnt the method given above of uniting stocks. Before I read his work, I used to do it by stupifying the bees of one hive with the smoke of the puff-ball. _(Boleus maximus.)_ But I find the smoke of linen rags sufficiently powerful to enable you to get the necessary command over your bees, and I now never use anything else. In countries where the winter is cold, and the bees are torpid during several months, this method saves the lives of those bees who have not made enough honey to last the winter. You get for yourself what you may find in the hive, as well as the war; and the doubled or married hive, as the French call it, wonderful to tell, will consume no more honey than the single stock. Each bee takes half-rations, as it were: their vital heat is, I believe, sustained by their being packed together close in the hive; and they, therefore, do not need so much food as an internal stimulant. I have repeated this experiment over and over again, and have always found it so. In this country the union of stocks will give a bee master his main supply of honey; and besides, when his apiary is fully stocked, will enable him to reduce his stocks within limit, without having recourse to the murderous sulphur match. He will get as much honey by this method as he could by the old. His remaining stocks will be stronger, and work better, during the winter : above all, he will not have the murder of thousands of bees at his door. In certain districts of England I got this plan pretty generally adopted. I myself instructed a cottager, Joseph Barnett, of Cumnor, in the method of joining stocks; and sent him round in the harvest season to the neighbouring bee keepers. Where they would not adopt it themselves, his plan was this : he said, " I will give you a shilling to let me take your honey for you, if you will let me take the bees away with me." "Take them, and welcome," was the usual answer ; " and much good may a parcel of bees, if you don't kill them, do you, without the comb." I had a small deal box made to carry them in ; and when he got home, he united them to my own stocks.
Some people thought that it is impossible to introduce a new system, like that which I recommend, gene, really among the cottagers, who are so much wedded to the ways in which their fathers have walked before them. With this feeling I am the last to quarrel ; but I was resolved to try what I could do; for I was sure that if I gained my end, I should benefit them by the change. Now success, far beyond what any teacher of new ways has a right to expect, has been granted to me. As a proof of this, I will give a conversation which took place the other day between Joseph Barnett and myself :--
" Well, Barnett, what do the people about Cumnor now think about our plan?"
A few more words, and I have done about the union of stocks.
If two bee keepers, living a mile or so apart, will agree as to the time for taking up their surplus stock, they will find it mutually beneficial to exchange the bees from which they have taken the honey, each bee master uniting to his own stocks the bees which have come from a distance. It will do very well, as I have said above, to unite adjoining hives by placing a double stock between where they stood; but it is better still to bring them from a distance, if possible; for the bees will more readily get accustomed to their fresh home.
**VII.**Feeding.--In this country the bees are generally, I am thankful to say, able to feed themselves all the year round, and lay up a surplus for their master likewise; so that I shall not say much on this head. There is hardly any season, at least in the northern parts of the island, in which the bees do not work nearly all the year, as there is a perpetual succession of flowers in the woods: so whenever a bee master has a hive which is dwindling away, he had better unite it to its next neighbour, rather than attempt to restore its vigour by feeding. Indeed, in nine cases out of ten he will find that the loss of the queen, and not a lack of honey, is the cause of its failure; and after uniting the bees, as explained in a former letter, he will have several pounds of honey, and at least a pound of wax. Unite, rather than feed, when you have your apiary fully stocked. But as there are three or four circumstances under which feeding may be re quired even in this country, I must not altogether pass the subject by; and they are these: 1st, When you have only one stock hive in your apiary, and some accident has happened to it; the combs, perhaps, have all been broken down by clumsiness in moving it to its new station, or what not. In this case nothing is easier than to feed it by placing before the hive, on a fine day, the honey combs which have fallen. The bees will soon empty them. If you think they want some more food, boil some sugar with water or mild beer into a syrup, about the consistency of thin treacle; do not use the very coarse sugar--for this the bees do not like--nor boil the syrup longer than is necessary to dissolve the sugar: stir it also, that it may not burn. Then pour some of this syrup out of a bottle, or tin made like an oil feeder, into the cells of the comb which has been emptied, and place it before the hive as before. Remember that there is no better food for bees than honey, when it can be got (it is mother's milk to them), nor any better feeder than a piece of empty honeycomb. Itprevents the bees daubingthemselves. But this out of doors mode of feeding does not do when you have more hives than one; for all the bees will help themselves, and the strongest hive will get the most. So you must adopt another plan. Put the comb, with honey or syrup, in an empty bee box, and then place the hive which you wish to strengthen on the top of it; they will take it all up during the night. I have known a hive to take up as much as 31th in one night. It was a hive which I doubled one autumn in England, which had very little honey,and I wanted to feed it up to the weight which would enable it to pass the winter in safety. If you have a straw hive with a hole in the top, for working caps or glasses, it is a very good plan to give the bees their additional supply, by placing it in combs on the top of the hive, and then turning another hive over them like a cover.
3dly, A second time when feeding is necessary, in if a succession of very bad weather sets in after a new swarm has been hived. I have told you that each bee swarms with her honey bag full. They convert this into wax during the first and second days. You may observe that very few bees stir out the first day; after that they want a fresh supply; and if by stress of weather they are prevented from going abroad to seek it, a few pounds of honey or syrup will be well bestowed, and amply repaid. It is not like an alms given to an idle beggar, but a seasonable loan to an industrious tradesman. I have seen the following very neat method of giving food to a hive: A large gimled hole is driven from the back of the bottom board, in the thickness of the plank. The outside of this hole is plugged up, and a sort of pond cut in the middle of the bottom board within the hive, so deep that the bottom of it comes below the level of the gimled hole. Outside the hive a round hole, tightly fitting the neck of a common bottle, is cut down into this same underground (or rather underwood) passage. If the bottle is filled with syrup, and turned togyturvy into the hole, the fluid will run along the channel, and fill the pond, which should not be above half an inch broad, and three or four inches long. When the bees suck up the syrup down to the level of the pipe, a bubble of air will pass up into the bottle, and a drop of syrup will come down, after the manner of a common bird glass. Feeders of zinc, to put at the door of the hive, or on the top, may be made on the same principle.
8dly, Sometimes your hives will need a little feeding when a severe drought comes on, such as we had in the summer of 1846-7. Not only are the bees, in good situations, unable to lay up any surplus honey in these seasons, but they cannot even get enough to feed their grubs, and so cast them out to perish in front of the hives. This seems cruel, but it is a real kindness. It is better that they should die at once by exposure, than drag on a miserable half starved existence for some days in their cells. At such times, a few pounds of food will enable your bees to rear their young, and they will amply repay you when the first shower comes. I do not think we shall often have droughts in this country ; and even when we do, the bees will get plenty if they are near extensive forests. It is only in the open country where they are mainly dependant on the produce of clover paddocks, &c., that they need such attention in the time of drought.
4thly, An observatory hive, if you have one, will need constant attention. As the bees can only make a single comb in it, they are of course unable to lay up a large supply against " a rainy day ;" so do not let the cells in which they store honey ever get quite empty ; if they have a large quantity of brood to feed, a day or two of very bad weather will make a heavy drain upon their scanty stock. You may either introduce a trough filled with syrup in at the door, which is left for the purpose at the back of the hive, or place a piece of comb on the top of the hive : take out one of the plugs which are there for the purpose, and cover it over with a glass or box, and the bees will soon avail themselves of the seasonable supply. I must repeat, that there is no food so good as honey for a weak stock ; so do not press your honey combs ; but after all has drained out that will, keep them in a secure place, and give them, either as a treat all round, to your whole apiary--in which case you have only to put it in a dish in front of your hive on a fine day--or as a private feed to your weak hives ; and then you must give it in such a manner that other bees may not be attracted by the smell : for if plunderers are led into the hive which you are feeding by the scent of the honey, they will not only carry off all that you intended for other mouths than theirs, but not content with this, will empty every cell in the hive into which they have been attracted, and very often kill all the bees into the bargain, who can make but a feeble resistance against the pillaging hordes of their stronger neighbours.
There is one other sort of food which bees require, and which they cannot do without, viz., water ; which you will do well to supply them with, if they do not find it near their hives. It is bad to have your hives quite close to a large river or pool of water, for thousands of bees will be beaten down into the water by high winds, when they are returning heavily laden to their hive; but a small rivulet is a good thing to have near: in the summer season you will see a great number of bees standing on any little stones or bits of grass which may be by its edge, drinking to their heart's content. In defect of a stream, they will find out any pump or water butt which is handy to their hive, and satisfy themselves there; or even at places where the water they get is stagnant, or even impure. But as water carrying is heavy work for bees as well as for men, it is well, if their natural supply is far off, to set pans of water near their hives, filled to the level of the water with stones or moss, best the bees should fall in when they alight to drink: a very convenient means of supplying them is to have a small wooden trough, with a piece of wood floating on the top of the water, not getting light, but so that it will always sink to the water level; the bees will perch on this board, and drink their fill from between it and the sides of the trough. I was led to think that bees are fond of salt water, and I placed near my apiary one trough of fresh, and one of salt water: for one bee that went to the fresh water, there were twenty at the salt lick. But they seem to be very capricious in their tastes; they will for some weeks be constantly at the salt trough, and then all of a sudden they seem to have no more need for salt provisions in the domestic arrangements of their hive, and it will be entirely deserted. The time of these "'fancies" should be noted in the bee register, and we may then hope to learn why their "tastes differ, and appetites vary," in this manner,I suppose it has something to do with the food which the young grubs require, as their nurses take up the greatest quantity of salt and water in the breeding season. There is a notion among the bee keepers in the Isle of Wight, that every bee goes down to the sea to drink every day. This is, of course, an exaggeration; but I have often seen a number of bees licking the mud in a salt water creek where the tide is out. So much for bee feeding.
VIII. Preparing Honey and Wax for Use.--As you take the honey combs out of the hive, separate those which are quite full from such as are only partly so; those which are pure virgin combs from such as are dark in colour, or have some of the cells filled with bee bread. This separation may easily be made by having several dishes or milk pans by you, in which to lay the different sorts of comb as they come to hand. By making this division at once, you will save a good deal of honey; for if all the combs are heaped together in one vessel, the dark combs, which are the hardest, will crush and otherwise injure the pure virgin combs; (as in the ways of the world, the weakest go to the wall, and these weakest are not seldom the best). In them the wax is very thin and fragile, hardly able to bear the weight of the honey which they contain, and sinking immediately under any external pressure. Often you will find two sorts of honey comb, the pure and the impure, in the same cake. Separate them at once with a sharp knife. Every subsequent handling of the combs is attended with considerable loss of honey, to say nothing of its being at best but a sticky job;so that it is well to get it done at once, and make one handling do for all. If you take a top box or a glass entirely full of pure honey, you need not be in any hurry to cut it out; it will keep better where it is, if only you place it in security, where no bee on a foraging excursion can possibly find it out. If once a single scout reach it, he will soon be succeeded by a whole fatigue party, who will carry off their prize in doublequick time. If you doubt this, leave twenty pounds of honey comb before your apiary, in the middle of a warm day: come again in an hour or two, and if you expect to find much, you will be gloriously disappointed.
After a large take of honey, when all the dishes, as they are filled, have been carried into the house, then there will be a noble sight to see. When describing that event, so important in a farm house, viz., killing the great beacon pig, Cobbett says, in his graphic style, " Now the house is full of meat;" and he forthwith proceeds to wisen with the good housewife as to the disposal to the best advantage of every part of the hog, from the petittoes up to the noble flitch. So now I must teach you how to dispose of " your house full of honey."
The pure virgin combs fetch the highest price, and are more wholesome to eat. If you are in the neighbourhood of an English town, you will find a ready sale for as much as you choose to take in, for some time to come; but to secure this sale, they must be perfectly clean and unbroken, fit to set upon an emperor's table. Who likes to see a pat of butter with the print of the cow obliterated by that of a
wasted; for the bees do not consume any more, because they have their hive well stored. You only pour honey from one pot into another. You lay up sixpences in a savings bank, from which you may draw pounds in a proper time. The bees will leave your wax in a fit state for melting, of which more anon. I have not yet done with the honey :--
The virgin honey is the easiest to extract, and is of course the finest, because you get it purest from the comb. Honey equally pure is stored by the bees in foul combs. The question is, how to get it out. It is like pouring off liquor from a bottle which has a great sediment in it. You must do it carefully, or a muddy stream will flow instead of a pure one. Remember what it is that has made the cells foul. Young bees have been bred in some cells, and bee bread has been stored in others. The old careless way of pressing all the combs together, good, bad, and indifferent, gives you nothing but second rate honey, mixed with a great deal of stuff which it will not do to name, or even to think of, while you are eating it. Hear what good Sir John More said, 140 years ago, of this careless way of extracting the honey:--
" In Hampshire, where there are great quantities of bee gardens well stock'd, the bee man does not take the care as is here set down, but takes all the honey combs out of the hive with a light shovel; he puts all into a tub, and pounds 'em all together; and then, putting it confusedly into a strong haired bag, does violently press out all that will run; and this (having first its season of heat over the fire) they put in barrels or other vessels to work. This done, they put what remains in the bag into a trough or other vessel, and wash it for meath. When the sweetest is all washed out, being crushed dry, the balls they try for wax."
Let this, then, be one of your standing rules : never press your honey comb ; slice your dark combs, as I told you to do the virgin ones, and pure honey will run from them. If you press them, you get the bee bread and other impurities mixed up with it. When all has run that will, let the bees pick up the n**?**mainder, and then put by the impure combs apart from the combs against you try down your wax.
Where apiaries are established on a very large scale, and honey is abundant, it will be found convenient to have a tin vessel made like the woodcut, to strain the honey in large quantities directly it is taken from the hives : (_a_) is a funnel of tin which will hold a hundred weight or two of combs, which should be placed in it directly they are sliced, in such a position that the honey may drain freely from them : (_b_) is a strong open strainer of perforated tin, on which the combs rest to prevent them pressing upon or clogging up the finer strainer (_c_), made of coarse muslin or gauze stretched on an iron ring. The funnel contracts below the second strainer, and ends in a pipe, which goes into the honey pot (_d_) placed below to receive what drains from the pipe. This pipe should fit pretty closely in a hole cut in the top of a temporary wooden lid made for the honey pot, or the bees will soon be attracted by the smell, and carry away the honey as fast as it drips.
The practical mode of preparing the wax I shall give in the words of the same Sir John More, whom I have quoted above.
" The manner of ordering the wax is as followeth:
--Take the wax and dress, and set it over the fire in a kettle or cauldron that may easily contain it; then pour in so much water as will make the wax swim, that it may boil without burning; and for this reason, while it is boiling gently over the fire, stir it often; when it is thoroughly melted, take it off the fire, and presently pour it out of the kettle into a strainer of fine thin linen, or of twisted hair, ready placed upon a screw or press; lay on the cover, and press out the liquor (as long as any wax comes) into a
household wisdom, our grandfathers were certainly our betters. I would only recommend you not to put your very fine wax in with the common wax; but reserve it for an easier process, of which I will speak presently.
I have found it a good plan to put all the wax into the strainer at first; a flannel bag does as well for want of the hair bag mentioned in the receipt; then boil it, as you would a plumpudding, in a large pot of water. When it is all melted, lift it out, and put it into the press, which should be previously heated by pouring hot water upon it, or it will congeal the wax as it flows. The press should be set slanting, and have a spout leading from the lower side to the cold water into which the wax is to flow. The simplest kind of press I know is made of two stout boards planed smooth, the lower fixed on a slant, the upper one joined to it by stout hinges at the upper end, with a long lever coming from the lower end. When finished it will look like a gigantic pair of nutrackers. Strips of wood should be nailed round the edges of the lower board, to prevent the wax flowing off sideways. When you put your bag with the honey in it into this press, you may put any degree of pressure upon it you please. If you think all the wax has not flowed from the bag at one pressure, return it again to the boiling pot, and try again. Now for a few words about melting your finer combs: Crush them with your hands into a saucepan with a little water at the bottom of it. Melt this slowly before the fire without boiling it. Take a fine sieve, or a piece of muslin; dip it into scalding water before you use it,to strain the wax: for if it is cold, much will congeal upon it; then pour the fine wax through it into the moulds prepared as Sir John More directs.
A cup or basin is a mould for wax always ready at hand, and the bee wife may cast her cakes of wax to suit her own convenience, for household use. But when the produce of her bees exceeds her home consumption, she will find it convenient to run the wax into moulds containing each a pound, or some multiple of a pound, just as the dairy woman makes up her pound pats, and so on. When New Zealand exports wax, which will be when the produce of the woods is joined to that of the apiaries, it will be found most convenient to cast the wax into squares, like the chocolate cakes, which the Americans export to all parts of the world.
Hitherto I have spoken of honey and wax, the produce of the bees in their first and simple forms. The bleached wax of commerce is easily prepared by increasing the surface of the wax, and then exposing it to the action of sun and air. The method by which this is done in Poland, where bleached wax is made to a great extent, is to pour the melted fluid as cold as it will run through a hopper, with a slip in the bottom of it, upon a cylinder of metal turned true, which is kept cold by revolving in such a way that the lower part is always in water, just like a grindstone. By this means, the wax is spun out into long thin ribbands. These ribbands are then laid upon a frame covered with linen cloth, and exposed to the action of the sun, air, and dew. If the weather is fine, the colour will change in a few days.
Then melt again, and repeat the operation till the whole substance of the wax is perfectly white. Then cast them into cakes for use or sale.*