FROM A SUBURBAN BALCONY

Evening Star, Issue 20196, 8 June 1929, Page 2

FROM A SUBURBAN BALCONY

MODE ABOUT BEES AND HONEY lx a previous contribution on the subject of bees and honey I merely skimmed the surface of the subject. It is so vast, presents So many interesting and suggestive topics, that one might go for an indefinite length of time and conclude without finishing. The, subject, too, has more than an esthetic, or ethical, or scientific interest. It has an economic one as well, for New Zealand honey is making its way by its merits into the markets of the world. Last year there were 1,030 tons of honey produced, which would be -worth thirty or forty , thousand pounds or thereabouts, so that honey production is becoming a valuable business for the dominion. .• But, this apart, let us put down two or three other things, selected at random, about hees and honey.

For the average person the most impressive point about bees their sting. It is generally supposed that the sting is for a weapon of defence. This is not its primary purpose. It appears •hat its primary purpose is to be a tool for work, and that work is infusing the formic acid into the cell of honey which prevents its fermentation, and so secures its keeping good for an indefinite time. The bees further use it as a kind of trowel for capping the wax on the honey cells of the comb. Thus the sting, which the uninitiated think would have been best omitted in the structure of the creature, turns out to be an essential for its work. In fact, it secures for ns tho produce which sweetens life, and makes honey a valuable article of commerce. There is a further use for the sting. I was once visiting a bee farmer in Southland. He was showing me the hives. The bees were flying around, and, in spite of my interest in the thing, I began to feel more than a little uncomfortable. I had once or twice an experience of a bee sting, and I had no ambition to have a repetition of it. My friend showed no fear as he moved about amongst them. He asked me afterwards if I were afraid of being stung. I replied that perhaps if he had been as much afraid as 1 was he would have run away. So 1 was somewhat proud of my courage. Then he told me a curious thing. He said he Tised to get an attack of rheumatic fever almost every year. He was once or twice stung by the hees when lie began to cultivate them. That seemed to make him immune to the stings. It did more. It made him immune to the fever. Ho has never had it since, and that was many years ago. It would seem to be that the cure would almost be as bad as the disease. I have since been told that medical men admit the truth of my informant’s claim, and that one can now purchase the poison emitted from bees’ stings in the chemists’ shops. So the sting turns out to be a blessing in disguise! It has been aptly compared to a fanner working with a in a haylleld, He is very busy, but if he were attacked, and in danger of his life, he would, no doubt, defend himself with the instrument he was using for his work. And this is the rationale of the sting of the bee.

Reverting again to the economic uses of the bee, one must not forget the service rendered by another of the species—tho humble bees. Farmers have good reason to be thankful to them. Thomson, in his ‘ New Zealand Naturalist Calendar,’ tells us they were introduced into this dominion in 1885 by the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, and at once made themselves at home here. They spread rapidly. In about three years after their liberation iu Canterbury they had made their way to Dunedin, and a year later had gob as far south as Invercargill. As is well known, they pollinate tho red clover. Fields that were almost barren produced a, perfect mass of seeds after their introduction. Apart from his value as a pollinator of red clover, the humble bee is an interesting little fellow. H© is the happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care of the bee tribe. He is the nearest relative to the valued honey bee. But he is very unlike the latter. He lives mainly a solitary life. He builds no nests, constructs nothing approaching the marvel of the architecture of the honey bee. The latter like open spaces, have no time to spare for anything but their work, and are wildly impatient of anything that impedes them. Not so the humble bee. He dodges about, humming a song to himself and poking in anywhere. Ho pushes down into the forest of the mowing grass. If he is entangled he patiently climbs up some handy stem again, and goes singing away without any sign of annoyance. As Richard Jefferies says: “No cunning work in glass receives his labour. But down to the flowering nettle in the mossysided ditch, up into the tall elm, wandering in and into and round the branched buttercups, along the banks of the brook, far inside tho deepest wood away he wanders, despising nothing. - . . He grows stiff at

nightfall in these autumn days, and he must creep where be may, if, possibly, ho may escape the frost, or make his way to his home in the ground or the ditch that he has lined with moss. Then at last death finds him and his 200 or 300 of a family, and all perish save one female, who survives to next spring to renew the brood and recommence the same fatal circle again.” Mr Thomson says they are diminishing in number, and tells Darwin’s wellknown story about their existence being dependent on the number of field mice which destroy their nest, and the mice again being dependent in their turn on the number of cats in a district.

And the tragedy of their lives suggests that of the drones in the hives of the honey bee. Funny gentleman the drone! —if to lie a gentleman is to be well fed, well dressed, go about and do nothing for your living. That is the main employment, if it can be called employment, of the drones. There are

some 200 or 300 of them in the hive. They .are bigger than the workers, stronger on tin wing, and more boisterous in their behaviour. They get up late in the day, whom the sun is about at his height, arrange carefully their toilet, and have their meals on food carefully prepared by their slaving sisters. Then by and by they go forth on their fatal love quest, the quest that is so beautifully portrayed in regard to butterflies in the opening chapter of James Lane Allen’s ‘ Summer in Arcady.’ They go forth—the drones — in the hope of meeting and mating with the queen bee. For only one of the crowd is .this supremo honour reserved, and the 'honour is doom. It is the death of the mating drone. The queen returns to the hive, but her husband or paramour, or whatever you like to call the mating drone, perishes when his function is completed. But all his fellows in due course meet with a similar fate. As winter approaches the fiat goes forth that these idle gentlemen—the drones—are nob longer to be tolerated in the hive. So the workers take them and drag them outside to the edge of the alighting board of the hive, and pitch them over. A line of workers ranges itself at the doorway, and refuses them permission" to re-enter. Worn out with the unusual exertion which this has involved, they drop to the ground in a kind of torpor, and the chilly night brings on the sleep that knows no waking.

A hundred more points call for comment regarding these wonderful little creatures, ‘the bees. Not the least is the problem which they offer to evolution. The drones have a mother, but no father. One sex lias the mysterious power of reproducing itself. The queen possesses the means of reproducing a progeny which is not in any way like herself. The drone is a male bee that could not live apart from the colony. The queen is more or less in like case, yet the product of the two is an insect which has special organs for gathering honey, entirely different from its parents, and a much higher intelligence. Tins, among other things, is a hard nut for the evolutionist. As an authority on the subject says: “These problems stagger me in connection with the theory of evolution. I am bound to say that, reasonable and even probable as the theory appears, there arc undoubtedly cases which would appear entirely to negative it.” And this is one. Bor.