Bees will freely take salt during the early part of the breeding season; but water is absolutely necessary for them, and should be regularly supplied in troughs near the entrance, with straws floating in it, so that the bees may drink without fear of drowning. To ascertain whether bees are sustaining injury from want of water, it is only necessary to examine the bottom of the hive. If candied grains of honey appear, no time must be lost in supplying water, _for the bees are eating up their honey in order to obtain it_. This is one cause of the starvation of bees; for lack of water they have too rapidly consumed their stores. Bees work in the dark because the admission of light would candy the honey, and they could not seal it up in its proper liquid state. Glass hives, in which they are made to work in the glare of light, are therefore unnatural. An indication of their dislike to light appears in the attempts they make to obscure the small windows often placed in hives for purposes of examination.
Some people think it possible to overstock a district with bees; but we do not think it ever has occurred in Great Britain. Think of the square miles of orchards, fields of clover and beans, and tracts of heather and other honey-producing plants this country contains, and of the thousands of tons of that substance which must pass from them into the atmosphere, much of which might be gathered for the use of man! How many agricultural labourers and railway porters in country districts might double their earnings by keeping bees! Farmers who grow clovers for seed would find that the multiplication of bees around them would be of immense advantage, for these plants depend to a great extent upon the visits of the bee for fertilisation and consequent production of seed. This simple fact ought to be generally known.
It is a good plan to grow borage, thyme, mignonette, heliotrope, heather, and other honey-containing flowers in the neighbourhood of the apiary; infirm or young bees will not then have to fly far in search of honey. Fields of beans contain large quantities of honey. Mr Pettigrew estimates that a twenty-acre field of grass well sprinkled with the flowers of white clover, yields to bees every fine day at least one hundred pounds of honey; and that twenty acres of heather in flower yield two hundred pounds of honey per day. White clover has been called the queen of honey-plants. Heather is more appreciated for bees in Scotland than in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire, where it also abounds. Bees will not as a rule fly far in search of honey, but a circle with a radius of four miles will almost everywhere yield abundant pasturage. If there are cultivated fields within two miles it will be all the better.