BEES HOAXED

Evening Star, Issue 19787, 10 February 1928, Page 2

BEES HOAXED

ROUSED BY ELECTRIC LIGHT NOVEL PLAN INCREASES HONEY CROP The busy bee has been hoaxed to make him busier, and the trick has netted a gain averaging 171 b of honey to the hive. Mr R. Borlase Matthews, who long ago conceived the idea of waking hens up in the middle of the night with a flood of electric light, so that they would eat more and lay more eggs, told the Electrical Association of Women the other day how he perpetrated a hoax on his bees. He wasn’t aware how the hoax had worked until he harvested bis summer honey crop. The experiment was tried early in the spring. A beam of light, he said, was thrown on the entrance of the hives from electric lamps. This ha,d the same effect as a dinner gong in a boarding house,. and stirred the bees to action.

The sleepy bees rubbed their_ eyes in anticipation, and hurried out into the open to greet what they thought was the first real sunny day of spring. Stimulated by the electric rays which the bees thought came from Old Sol himself ; the early bees scampered back &tp, the feive to tell the .queen bee nnd

all tho follow-bees that spring had come. Then the work bees got bigjy, gave tho hive a good airing by flapping their wings, and the queen bee began to lay eggs just as fast as she could. Air Alatthews said his artificial sun caused such a commotion that lie could not boar the thought of deceiving tho bees further, so ho prepared a feast for them. Directly in front of the bees’ home a table was set, and the lights kept burning. There were plates of nice golden vinegar, plates of artificial pollen, and other dishes, with plenty of nice, pure water. Bees are always very thirsty early in the spring. On the table also was a great vase of flowers, to provide the bees with an admixture of real pollen and to complete the illusion.

In the end it was ascertained that the bees got out weeks earlier than they would have if they had waited for Nature. They fertilised thoroughly the apple crop, which was a recordbreaker, while a gain of seventeen pounds in honey was recorded for each hire on which the hoax was worked.