It must be remembered that a constant supply of fresh air of the right temperature is as necessary for the brewing honey as it is for the bees and young brood. The nectar, as gathered from the flowers, needs to be deprived of the greater part of its moisture before it becomes honey. Thus, in the course of the season, many gallons of water must pass out of the hive in the form of vapour, and the removal of this water constitutes an important part of the work of the ventilating army. Here, again, the wisdom of the bees in insisting on a mechanical, as opposed to an automatic, system of air-renewal, becomes evident. If the warm, moisture-laden air were left to discharge itself from the hive by its own buoyancy, condensation of this moisture would take place on the cooler surfaces of the hive-walls, and the lower regions of the hive would speedily become a quagmire. But by setting up a mechanically-driven current the air is drawn out before condensation can take place, and thus, in one operation, forming a veritable triumph in economics, the hive interior is rendered both dry and salutary, while its temperature is sustained at the necessary hatching-point for the young brood.
A reflection which will occur to most thinking minds is, why should the domesticated honey-bee be constrained to resort to all these devices, when the wild bee seems to lead a happy-go-lucky existence, comparatively free, so far as we know, from such complicated cares? The answer to this is that the science of apiculture has wrought a change in the bees’ normal environment which is probably without parallel in the whole history of the domestication of the lower creatures. In a modern hive the honey-bee lives on a vastly elaborated scale, and the ancient rules of bee-life are no longer applicable. Much the same sort of thing has happened as in the case of a village which has grown to a city. It is useless to deal with the new order of things as a mere question of arithmetic. Abnormal growth in a community involves change not only in scale but in principle; and it is the same with a hive of bees as with a hive of men.
STUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee—and perhaps there has been more written about bees during the last two thousand years than of all other creatures put together—do not quite know what to make of Moses Rusden, who was Charles the Second’s bee-master, and wrote his “Further Discovery of Bees” in the year 1679. The wonder about Rusden is that obviously he knew so much that was true about bee-life, and yet seems, of set purpose, to have imparted so little. He was a shrewdly observant man, of lifelong experience in his craft. His system of bee-keeping would not have disgraced many an apiculturist of the present time, often yielding him a honey harvest averaging sixty pounds to the hive, which is a result not always achieved even by our foremost apiarian scientists. His hives were fitted with glass windows, through which he was continually studying his bees. He must have had endless opportunities of proving the fallacy and folly of the ancient classic notions as to bee-life. And yet we find him gravely upholding almost the entire framework of fantastic error, old even in Pliny’s time; and speaking of the king-bee with his generals, captains, and retinue, honey that was a dew divinely sent down from heaven, the miraculous propagation of bee-kind from the flowers, and all the other curious myths and fables handed down from writer to writer since the very earliest days.