the light snow covered the path through the bee-farm, and whitened the roof of every hive. in the red winter twilight it looked more like a human city than ever, with its long double rows of miniature houses stretching away into the dusk on either hand, and its broad central thoroughfare, where the larger hives crowded shoulder to shoulder, casting their black shadows over the glimmering snow.
the bee-master led the way towards the extracting-house at the end of the garden, as full of his work, seemingly, as ever he had been in the press of summer days. there was noise enough going on in the long lighted building ahead of us, but i missed the droning song of the great extractor itself.
“no; we have done with honey work for this year,” said the old bee-man. “it is all bottled and cased long ago, and most of it gone to london. but there’s work enough still, as you’ll see. the bees get their long rest in the winter; but, on a big honey-farm, the humans must work all the year round.”
as we drew into the zone of light from the windows, many sounds that from afar had seemed incongruous enough on the silent, frost-bound evening began to explain themselves. the whole building was full of busy life. a furnace roared under a great caldron of smoking syrup, which the foreman was vigorously stirring. in the far corner an oil engine clanked and spluttered. a circular saw was screaming through a baulk of timber, slicing it up into thin planks as a man would turn over the leaves of a book. planing machines and hammers and handsaws innumerable added their voices to the general chorus; and out of the shining steel jaws of an implement that looked half printing-press and half clothes-wringer there flowed sheet after sheet of some glistening golden material, the use of which i could only dimly guess at.
but i had time only for one swift glance at this mysterious monster. the bee-master gripped me by the arm and drew me towards the furnace.
“this is bee-candy,” he explained, “winter food for the hives. we make a lot of it and send it all over the country. but it’s ticklish work. when the syrup comes to the galloping-point it must boil for one minute, no more and no less. if we boil it too little it won’t set, and if too much it goes hard, and the bees can’t take it.”
he took up his station now, watch in hand, close to the man who was stirring, while two or three others looked anxiously on.
“time!” shouted the bee-master.
the great caldron swung off the stove on its suspending chain. near the fire stood a water tank, and into this the big vessel of boiling syrup was p. 88suddenly doused right up to the brim, the stirrer labouring all the time at the seething grey mass more furiously than ever.
“the quicker we can cool it the better it is,” explained the old bee-keeper, through the steam. he was peering into the caldron as he spoke, watching the syrup change from dark clear grey to a dirty white, like half-thawed snow. now he gave a sudden signal. a strong rod was instantly passed through the handles of the caldron. the vessel was whisked out of its icy bath and borne rapidly away. following hard upon its heels, we saw the bearers halt near some long, low trestle-tables, where hundreds of little wooden boxes were ranged side by side. into these the thick, sludgy syrup was poured as rapidly as possible, until all were filled.
“each box,” said the bee-master, as we watched the candy gradually setting snow-white in its wooden frames, “each box holds about a pound. the box is put into the hive upside-down on the top of the comb-frames, just over the cluster of bees; and the bottom is glazed because then you can see when the candy is exhausted, and the time has come to put on another case. what is it made of? well, every maker has his own private formula, and mine is a secret like the rest. but it is sugar, mostly—cane-sugar. beet-sugar will not do; it is injurious to the bees.
“but candy-making,” he went on, as we moved slowly through the populous building, “is by no means the only winter work on a bee-farm. there are the hives to make for next season; all those we shall need for ourselves, and hundreds more we sell in the spring, either empty or stocked with bees. then here is the foundation mill.”
he turned to the contrivance i had noticed on my entry. the thin amber sheets of material, like crinkled glass, were still flowing out between the rollers. he took a sheet of it as it fell, and held it up to the light. a fine hexagonal pattern covered it completely from edge to edge.
“this,” he said, “we call super-foundation. it is pure refined wax, rolled into sheets as thin as paper, and milled on both sides with the shapes of the cells. all combs now are built by the bees on this artificial foundation; and there is enough wax here, thin as it is, to make the entire honeycomb. the bees add nothing to it, but simply knead it and draw it out into a comb two inches wide; and so all the time needed for wax-making by the bees is saved just when time is most precious—during the short season of the honey-flow.”
he took down a sheet from another pile close at hand.
“all that thin foundation,” he explained, “is for section-honey, and will be eaten. but this you could not eat. this is brood-foundation, made extra strong to bear the great heat of the lower hive. it is put into the brood-nest, and the cells reared on it are the cradles for the young bees. see how dense and brown it is, and how thick; it is six or seven times as heavy as the other. but it is all pure wax, though not so refined, and is made in the same way, serving the same useful, time-saving purpose.”
we moved on towards the store-rooms, out of the clatter of the machinery.
“it was a great day,” he said, reflectively, “a great day for bee-keeping when foundation was invented. the bee-man who lets his hives work on the old obsolete natural system nowadays makes a hopeless handicap of things. yet the saving of time and bee-labour is not the only, and is hardly the most important, outcome of the use of foundation. it has done a great deal more than that, for it has solved the very weighty problem of how to keep the number of drones in a hive within reasonable limits.”
he opened the door of a small side-room. from ceiling to floor the walls were covered with deep racks loaded with frames of empty comb, all ready for next season. taking down a couple of the frames, he brought them out into the light.
“these will explain to you what i mean,” said he. “this first one is a natural-built comb, made without the milled foundation. the centre and upper part, you see, is covered on both sides with the small cells of the worker-brood. but all the rest of the frame is filled with larger cells, and in these only drones are bred. bees, if left to themselves, will always rear a great many more drones than are needed; and as the drones gather no stores but only consume them in large quantities, a superabundance of the male-bees in a hive must mean a diminished honey-yield. but the use of foundation has changed all that. now look at this other frame. by filling all brood-frames with worker-foundation, as has been done here, we compel the bees to make only small cells, in which the rearing of drones is almost impossible; and so we keep the whole brood-space in the hive available for the generation of the working bee alone.”
“but,” i asked him, “are not drones absolutely necessary in a hive? the population cannot increase without the male bees.”
“good drones are just as important in a bee-garden as high-mettled, prolific queens,” he said; “and drone-breeding on a small scale must form part of the work on every modern bee-farm of any size. but my own practice is to confine the drones to two or three hives only. these are stationed in different parts of the farm. they are always selected stocks of the finest and most vigorous strain, and in them i encourage drone-breeding in every possible way. but the male bees in all honey-producing hives are limited to a few hundreds at most.”
coming out into the darkness from the brilliantly-lighted building, we had gone some way on our homeward road through the crowded bee-farm before we marked the change that had come over the sky. heavy vaporous clouds were slowly driving up from the west and blotting the stars out one by one. all their frosty sparkle was gone, and the night air had no longer the keen tooth of winter in it. the bee-master held up his hand.
“listen!” he said. “don’t you hear anything?”
i strained my ears to their utmost pitch. a dog barked forlornly in the distant village. some night-bird went past overhead with a faint jangling cry. but the slumbering bee-city around us was as silent and still as death.
“when you have lived among bees for forty years,” said the bee-master, plodding on again, “you may get ears as long as mine. just reckon it out. the wind has changed; that curlew knows the warm weather is coming; but the bees, huddled together in the midst of a double-walled hive, found it out long ago. now, there are between three and four hundred hives here. at a very modest computation, there must be as many bees crowded together on these few acres of land as there are people in the whole of london and brighton combined. and they are all awake, and talking, and telling each other that the cold spell is past. that is what i can hear now, and shall hear—down in the house yonder—all night long.”
