The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1858-02-11
4The Honey Bee.


We are glad to know that the little colony of
bees, which arrived in Honolulu about four
months since. are now, under the charge of DR..
Hillebrand, thriving finely. The hives are weighty
with white and delicious looking honey and the
inmates of each of them have so multiplied in
numbers that the Doctor is in daily expectation
of their swarming anew. The attempt which one
hive made last week, (Which was noticed in our
issue of the 4th) to send out a young colony. and
which failed principally for want of the presence
of a queen, has not, as yet, been repeated but
their guardian holds himself ready at a moments
warning to attend their luminous and install q
fifth swarm.
In the beautiful garden Of DR.. Hillebrand the
bees have a fine opportunity to gather sweets !;
but not satisfied with SO narrow a limit to their
labors, they visit all the various gardens of our
city daily, and seem to ffd great attractions in
many of the flowers cultivated there. The banana
blossoms and sweet-scented forabundas are their
especial favorites. and they work as hard in col
Letting and storing up honey as if they antici-
pated a long and frosty winter, and were anxious
to lay in speedily Il sufficient stock of provisions.
For so small a number Of bees there is no scarcity
of food in this vicinity and indeed, we think
that among the banana, kukui and other flower
ing trees and plants of these islands, there will be
sufficient sustenance for all the hives established
here for many years TO come.
But there IS such a thing as overstucking n dis
trict with bees and in some countries of the
eastern hemisphere laws have been introduced to
avert this result. 1t is a common practice in
Germany and Switzerland to carry the hives from
one place TO another, as fast as the owner i'm
AGNES the honey to be exhausted from the noun
tain heather in the vicinity. In lower Egypt,
where the flower harvest is not so early by several
weeks, as in the upper district, the practice of
transportation is carried on to a more considera-
BILE extent. At the beginning Of the season the
hives, after being collected at different villages,
marked and numbered by their owners, are heaped
pyranidally upon boats prepared to receive them,
and conveyed up the river 70 take the advantage
of the earliest lowers. They are then allowed to
float gradually down, stopping at different places
for longer or shorter periods, according to the
amount of produce afforded by the surrounding
country. And after travelling perhaps three
months in this way, and RECALLING t emselyes upon
the perfumes of the orange flowers, roses and
jessamines of Northern and Central Egypt, the
bees are carried back to the villages from which
they were first taken, and the boatmen receive
from their proprietors a recompensep roportionate
to the number of hives contributed by each. In
this way the Egyptians reap an abundance of de-
licious honey. The French, borrowing a lesson
from the Egyptians, adopt the same plan. Some
hundreds of hives are placed in a boat which floats
down the stream at night, and stops by day.
The bees wander forth in the morning in quest of
food, and at night, when they are all quietly
resting from their labors, the anchor is weighed,
and on floats the boat.
In case the bees find it difficult to procure sufE-
Gent sustenance from flowers, other kinds of food
may be given them to advantage. A French
paper contains the following account of u new
food recently discovered 1.-Two griculturists of
the Department of the Var observed one day, in
the month of May last, that all their bees had left
their hives, although the latter were well filled
and exceedingly heavy. Towards evening the
f~ugitives returned heavy laden, but on the follow
ing morning set out in a direction which was this
time carefully noted by the farmers, who had
been watching their doings. They Immediately
followed them. and soon arrived at a farm where
cakes of tilseed, which had been previously sub
jected to the oil press, were being beaten up into
a paste, with water, to be used as manure for
potatoes. There, to their surprise, theysa saw their
bees clustering round the tubs containing the
paste, evidently enjoying a luxury hitherto I'M
known to them. The lesson was not lost upon
the agriculturists, who Immediately procured
their bees abundance of this food, and have now
been rewarded with nearly ten times the usual
quantity of produce, besides an immense increase
in the reproduction Of the insect"
We know of no reason why the honey of our
bees should not be of excellent quality,
for there is here some variety of flowers, and
among them none that would be likely to impart
to it a disagreeable favor-for it is a well known
fact that honey is always liable to be favored by
the prevailing flower of a district. Among the
best honey in the world is that brought from the
of Bourbon-strongly favored with the
orange blossoms, from which it is in a great mea-
sure gathered. Corsican honey is favored with
the box tree and instances have occurred where
honey has been rendered worthless by being gath
cred in the vicinity of onion fields. The classic
of Mount Hymettus, in Greece, imparts
to the honey of that section the high flavor for
which it is so justly renowned and although
this thyme has been transferred again and again
into the gardens of the Italian bee keepers, they
have not succeeded in imparting with it its deli
cious aroma. The exiled plant never fourished
in the stranger soil, but lanquished for the barren
rocks and life-giving breezes of Attica. In Cuba,
the mignonnette is extensively cultivated, its dow-
ers yielding the finest favored honey known. The
export of honey from Cuba for 1887 amounted to
es0O,OO
A swarm of bees usually contains from ten to
thousand misunderstanding the queen,
tho workers. and the dronea, or males. The