A Book of Bees Read online

  During very cold weather, the colony of bees clusters tightly; on warmer days, the cluster expands slightly. On mild days, when melted snow runs in rivulets down the gravel roads, the cluster breaks up completely and the bees fly out of their hives. In protected places along the south face of creek hollows, they may discover the pollen-bearing catkins of hazelnut or even unseasonably early maple blossoms. But significant sources of new food—serviceberry blossoms and the general bloom of maples—are yet months away, and if the colonies are to survive they must rely, at least until March, on honey made from last autumn’s asters. As bees eat up the honey stores in one part of the hive, the cluster gradually moves to another part.

  Winter feeding of bees whose stores have been depleted is a risky procedure and may do more harm than good. Chilled, they will drown in the liquid honey or sugar syrup in a feeder. It is possible to give them a frame of honey from another hive, which they can use directly, but in order to do so the donor hive, too, must be opened and the seals that the bees have so carefully made against the cold must be broken. This stresses both colonies. Any bees that need to be fed should be fed early in the autumn, and even then I do it only on an emergency basis. If a hive is too low in stores to make it through the winter, I prefer to combine it with an abler hive in the autumn, because even if it makes it through the cold weather it will not be strong enough to prosper in the springtime.

  The low sun is no longer shining against my pine tree, so I move to another. I can see the fronts of the beehives better from here, too. I pour myself a cup of coffee from the thermos and settle down to watch the bees attending to their wintertime chores.

  In more northerly parts of this country and in Canada, where winters are long and severe, many commercial beekeepers gas and kill their bees at the end of each honey harvest. They can then take all the honey the bees have produced during the long daylight hours of a northern summer. In the spring, they start anew with package bees shipped from southern bee breeders. They consider this the only economical way to produce honey. A few years ago our state beekeeping association was addressed by one such commercial operator from Nebraska, who laid out the savings in labor costs in not overwintering the bees and totaled the cash benefits from being able to harvest a larger honey crop. The audience was quiet and attentive, and I thought perhaps I was the only one who found his methods repellent and unacceptable. I was surprised and pleased, however, when one of the most prominent commercial beekeepers in our state, a man with thousands of hives, jumped to his feet. He is a tough ex-marine, a shrewd businessman and no sentimentalist, but he passionately condemned the Nebraskan’s methods as cruel. He put into words what most of us at the meeting, as it turned out, believed: that was an ungrateful way to keep bees. We applauded him for a long time.

  I thought of the meeting while I sat watching my bees. It makes no business sense for me to spend the time and money to drive around to my beeyards in midwinter. I might better have spent my day in other ways than leaning against a pine tree in the pale sunshine sipping rapidly cooling coffee. I am not helping the bees now. They do not need me. But I need them.

  I bought my first beehives in the autumn, and then spent the following winter trying to figure out what to do with them. I read everything I could find in print about bees. I talked to as many beekeepers as would stand still for my questions. I joined the state beekeeping association and heard talks by the experts at its meetings. I found there are as many ways to keep bees as there are people to tell about it.

  Beekeepers are an opinionated lot, each sure his methods and his methods alone are the proper ones. When I first began with bees the great diversity of passionately held opinion bewildered me, but now that I have kept bees in widely scattered locations I think I understand. My bees cover one thousand square miles of southern Missouri in their foraging flights. I have detailed climatic maps of that rugged area, and they show that some beeyards, only a few miles apart, are in different climate zones. Frosts come earlier in some places than in others. Spring comes later. Rainfall is not the same. The soils and the flowering plants they support are unlike. Through the years I have learned that, as a result of all those variations, I must keep the bees variously. Most people who keep bees have only a few hives and keep them all in one place. They find it difficult to understand how practices they have found successful do not work for others. But I have learned I must treat the bees in one yard quite differently from those even thirty miles away. So it is no wonder that what works well with bees for a writer based in Vermont may not work at all for one based in Arizona. The thing to do, I discovered, was to learn from the bees themselves. After a person learns something of bee biology and behavior, he can make up his own rules—and then can have the fun of defending them passionately to other beekeepers.

  Beekeeping meetings are lively affairs, with hot arguments raging over the best methods of requeening, how to administer antibiotics and the proper way to super. Books and articles written about beekeeping are similarly warm and strong.

  I have never counted entries in a major research library catalog, but I suspect more has been written about bees than any other animal with which we share this planet.

  Beekeeping is farming for intellectuals. The Greeks spun tales about the god of beekeeping, Aristaeus. Pliny wrote about bees. Aristotle observed them, puzzled over them and reported his findings. Virgil made bees the subject of his fourth Georgic, a part of the series of poems with agricultural themes. Classicists insist that Virgil’s purposes were political, that he used bees and other agricultural motifs as a vehicle, yet it is clear that Virgil knew bees and loved them. His fourth Georgic is a beautiful poem, one that gives me goose bumps when I reread it sitting beside the woodstove fire on a winter evening. Quoting from L. A. S. Jermyn’s translation, it begins:

  Honey that’s borne upon the winds of heaven,

  A gift of the high gods, is now my tale.

  On this page too, Maecenas, turn thy glance.

  For look! amazement grows as thou beholdest

  Great-hearted leaders in such tiny states,

  Orderly custom, yes! and national aims

  Tribes and their tribal conflicts. Small the theme,

  But yet not small the glory, if such gods

  As frown thereon, permit the tale in song,

  And if Apollo hearken to my prayer.

  In the first place, we must seek out for bees

  A habitation free from wind that checks

  The airy robbers winging booty home,

  A place where sheep and butting goats tread not

  The flowers, nor hooves of wandering heifer sweep

  The dew from off the plain, nor crush the plants

  That newly spring. Far from the brimming cells

  Be lizards driven—for all their painted scales!—

  Bee-eaters too, nay, birds of every kind,

  And Procne in particular, her breast

  With blood-stained claws imbrued; for these make vain

  Your labour everywhere, and carry off

  In snapping bills the flying bees themselves,

  Sweet-savoured morsels for young beaks agape.

  But let clear founts be nigh, or moss-grown pools,

  Or tiny rivulet hurrying through the grass:

  Let palm or huge wild olive shade the porch,

  That when the young kings lead the early swarms,

  And, issuing from the hive, young warriors sport

  In the springtime which is their very own,

  A bank nearby may woo them from the heat,

  And fronting trees with hospitable shade

  Enfold them …

  Columella, the Roman writer on agriculture, knew his bees, and although nearly twenty centuries have passed since he wrote, his elegantly phrased advice still bears consideration:

  If thou wilt have the favor of thy bees, that they sting thee not, thou must avoid such things as offend them: thou must not be unchaste or uncleanly; for impurity and sluttiness (the
mselves being most chaste and neat) they utterly abhor; thou must not come among them smelling of sweat, or having stinking breath, caused either through the eating of leek, onions, garlick, and the like, or by other means, the noisomness whereof is corrected by a cup of beer; thou must not come puffing or blowing unto them, neither hastily stir among them, nor resolutely defend thyself when they seem to threaten thee; but softly moving thy hand before thy face, gently put them by; and lastly, thou must be no stranger to them. In a word, thou must be chaste, cleanly, sweet, sober, quiet, and familiar, so they will love thee …

  Throughout the centuries, bees continued to attract the attention of able and literate observers. Some of what has been written about them, because of the intellectual stature and abilities of the writer, is enduring, and deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in good writing about nature.

  In 1609, Charles Butler, an Englishman who also wrote books on logic, music, English grammar and the marriage of cousins, published The Feminine Monarchie, Written out of Experience, in which he daringly asserted that the King Bee was no male at all but a female and must henceforth be called Queen. In addition to being a close and accurate observer, Butler was a fine writer. The temptation is to quote page after page of his writing, but I shall hold myself to one small sample. He characterizes a drone, or a male bee, as

  a grosse Hive-Bee without a sting, which hath always been reputed a greedy lozell: for howsoever he brave it with his round velvet cap, his side downe, his full paunch and his lowd voice; yet he is but an idle companion, living by the sweat of others brows. For he worketh not at all, either at home or abroad, and yet he spendeth as much as two labourers: you shall never find his maw without a good drop of the purest nectar. In the heat of the day he flieth abroad, aloft, and about, and that with no small noise, as though he would doe some great act: but it is onely for his pleasure, and to get him a stomach, and then returns he presently to his cheere.

  François Huber was a Swiss naturalist who worked with bees in the late 1700s and early 1800s. He was blind, but with the help of his wife and a servant to make observations he wrote beautifully about bees. His dramatic description of a jealous virgin queen bee destroying her potential rivals before they have emerged from pupation has never been equaled:

  Hardly had ten minutes elapsed after the young queen emerged from her cell when she began to look for sealed queen cells. She rushed furiously upon the first that she met, and by dint of hard work, made a small opening in the end. We saw her drawing with her mandibles the silk of the cocoon which covered the inside. But probably she did not succeed according to her wishes, for she left the lower end of the cell and went to work on the upper end where she finally made a larger opening. As soon as this was sufficiently large, she turned about to push her abdomen into it. She made several movements in different directions until she succeeded in striking her rival with the deadly sting. She then left the cell and the bees which had remained so far perfectly passive began to enlarge the gap which she had made and draw out the corpse of a queen just out of her nymphal shell. During this time, the victorious queen rushed to another queen cell and again made a large opening, but she did not introduce her abdomen into it, this second cell containing only a royal pupa, not yet formed. The young queen rushed to a third cell, but she was unable to open it. She worked languidly and seemed tired from her first efforts.

  Unfortunately elegance and vivid style is no longer the fashion in entomological writing, but contemporary authors have much to tell us, and their books and articles are good reading on a long winter evening. Among the academics, J. L. Gould at Princeton and Roger Morse, from Cornell, both have done important work with bees and written of it. Entomologists associated with the federal bee laboratories under the Department of Agriculture, such as E. H. Erickson, publish the results of their research in the beekeeping magazines and entomological journals. The federal bee laboratories, scattered across the country, have been victims of budget cutting in recent years, but in the past they have generated both basic and applied research in apiculture. As a result, there are many helpful beekeeping pamphlets that may be purchased through the Government Printing Office.

  There are three basic “texts” for beekeeping:

  The Hive and the Honey Bee. Dadant & Sons, Hamilton, Illinois.

  The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture. A. I. Root et al., A. I. Root Co., Medina, Ohio.

  Honey: A Comprehensive Survey. Ed. by Eva Crane. Crane, Russak, & Co., New York.

  These three books are compilations of contributions by many authors, and as a result the books vary throughout in quality and readability. The first two are published by beekeeping supply companies and therefore lack a certain critical distance from the subject covered. All three contain more than the beginning beekeeper wants to know. He shouldn’t read them as an introduction to beekeeping, because they will overwhelm him, but he should buy them and save them for his second winter’s reading. They will be useful reference books for him later. Nearly every beekeeping supply company publishes a short introduction to beekeeping, and there are several others written for specific parts of the country by independent authors. Richard Taylor, a metaphysician and master beekeeper, has written a good guide for the Northeast, The How-To-Do-It Book of Beekeeping. Here in the middle part of the country, beginners can profit from Beekeeping in the Midwest, by Elbert R. Jaycox, an academic entomologist, a book available from the Agricultural Publications Office of the University of Illinois at Urbana.

  In addition there are many books on bees that are simply pleasant to read. One of the best is The Dancing Bees, by Karl von Frisch, a popular account of some of the work that earned him a Nobel prize. My own favorite is Frank R. Stockton’s classic, The Bee-Man of Orn, a children’s tale reissued in recent years with marvelous illustrations by Maurice Sendak.

  The above list is eclectic. I have left out important authors and important books. But once a person starts reading anywhere in the beekeeping literature, one author introduces the reader to another. One winter’s reading generates the next winter’s booklist.

  Aristaeus, that god of beekeeping, turned up as the villain in the celebrated and powerful film, Black Orpheus, the retelling of the love story of Eurydice and Orpheus set in Rio during the Carnival. Their story has been told and retold in opera, but Aristaeus has a story of his own.

  According to the ancients, Aristaeus was the son of Cyrene, a naiad who despised spinning, weaving and similar housewifely tasks. Instead, she preferred to hunt wild beasts all day and half the night. Apollo once watched her wrestle a lion to the ground and was so struck with love for her that he carried her off to Africa and built a palace for her there, in the place that still bears her name. After their son Aristaeus was born, Apollo left her, and Cyrene, yearning once again for wild places, left too, leaving her son to be raised by a group of myrtle nymphs who taught him how to curdle milk for cheese, keep bees in terra-cotta pots and cultivate olives.

  When he was grown, Aristaeus left Libya and traveled among human beings, who accorded him divine honors for the useful arts he taught them. He also practiced healing, and once cured the plague by changing the direction of the winds.

  In his wanderings, he met Eurydice, a wood nymph, the beloved of Orpheus. He tried to rape her, but she ran from him through the woods and in her terror did not see a large poisonous snake in her path. Tripping on a tree root, she stumbled and fell. The snake struck her and she died from the poison of the bite. Orpheus, heartbroken, went down into Tartarus to fetch her back, playing his lyre as he went. With his music he not only charmed the guards and the dog Cerberus at the gates of Tartarus, but temporarily suspended the torments of the wicked as well. Hades himself, lord of the underworld, was so moved he agreed to allow Eurydice, guided by the lyre music, to follow Orpheus back to the world of the living, provided that Orpheus did not look back at her until she was safely in the sunlight. But Orpheus so loved Eurydice he could not keep himself from looking to see whether she was
following, and so he lost her forever.

  The other gods were filled with wrath at Aristaeus and punished him by killing all of his bees. He had no idea why they had died, so he set out on a journey to find his mother, mistress of wild things, and ask her for help. After a long time, he found her living under a stream with other naiads. She knew nothing of bees but suggested that he go see her cousin, Proteus, he of the many shapes, and ask him why the bees had died. Aristaeus found Proteus and wrestled him to the ground to force him to hold one shape until he revealed that the bees had been destroyed by the gods.

  Armed with that piece of information, Aristaeus went back to Cyrene and asked her advice. She and the other naiads consulted and determined that he should return to his home, where he should sacrifice four bulls and four heifers and pour blood over them. Then he should go away, leaving the carcasses, and return nine days later, in the morning, with poppies of forgetfulness, a fatted calf and a black ewe to propitiate the ghost of Orpheus, who by this time had joined Eurydice’s shade in Tartarus.

  Aristaeus did as he was told, and when he returned on the ninth day he found a swarm of bees emerging from each of the carcasses. He captured them and put them in his empty terra-cotta beehives. Aristaeus was grateful for the gods’ forgiveness and settled with his bees in Boeotia, where he married Autonoë. To them were born two children: Macris, who was to become nurse to Dionysus, and the illfated Actaeon. After Actaeon had grown to manhood, he was out hunting one day with his dogs and quite by accident came upon a pool in which the goddess Artemis was bathing. He was so struck with her naked beauty that he stood and watched. Artemis was enraged when she discovered him, and punished him by changing him into a stag, whereupon he was torn to bits by his own pack of fifty hounds.

  Aristaeus was grieved by his son’s death and left Boeotia to begin traveling again. He went back to Libya, to Sardinia and distant islands, spreading the knowledge of beekeeping and the agricultural arts. Near Mount Haemus, in what is now known as the Balkan range, he founded the city of Aristaeum, and then, as a god may do, disappeared without a trace.