THE APIARY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3113, 12 November 1913, Page 12

THE APIARY.

(By J,A.)

COMMERCIAL BEE-KEEPING. HARVESTING. In old-time bee-keeping, harvest usually came after the grain was all safely in the stack. The tension being otf, the farmers mind when the last load was safely in ,he looked round to find out the odd jobs that had had to wait, and amongst them was the smoking of the bees. Some sulphur was procured, melted in an old pot, ami then some rags or stiff paper was made to carry as much of the melted sulphur as possibly. A very deadly dose it proved. As soon as it was dark enough (there are occasions when men love the darkness rather than the light), a hole was dug in close proximity to the doomed hives, in it was put a lighted sulphur rag, and then, stealthily, the hives were each lifted in turn from their bottom board and placed over the burning sulphur, whilst every possible way of escape either for bees or smoke was carefully blocked up. Truly, it was on ignoble ending to the joyous summer work of the bees.

What a contrast we - have in present-day methods. Wo work now in the daylight. We sock to get right amongst them, delighting in the roar of the coming and going thousands, and interested in seeing that every hive is working normally. Should the weather bo such that the bees are not flying, the beekeeper retires also; ho knows that on such occasions they are apt to be cross, and, when so, they have the faculty of making him cross also, so he finds something else to do. In the south we do not expect to have honey harvest until the beginning of the new year; further north it is earlier. In some cases it is delayed because of the system adopted by the beekeeper, he preferring to arid room on the hives as it is required, leaving the honey on the hive until the main flow is practically over. When this is done the harvest will usually begin about the first week of Februarv. Others, however, prefer to work with only one or, at most, two supers, and to extract as fast as the combs show about two-thirds of their area sealed over. This latter method is that preferred by the -writer. Possibly, if he lived further north, and especially in the North Island, the other method might bo adopted. The danger is that honey may be extracted that is not fully ripe, and that it may ferment and spoil for table use. There does not appear to be much danger of that in this locality; but in very warm, and at the same time very moist, localities there does appear to be a very real danger. In these days of steam and oil engines motive power is being largely used for extracting. A small oil engine is geared on to a six or eight frame extractor, and thus one man is able to do quicker and better what formerly was the work of two. Tidier and bettor work is also being done in the uncapping of the combs by the use of the steam uncapping-knife. Air Lea has added to the latter a much-needed improvement, which returns the steam instead of allowing a portion of it to condense and mix with the honey. A device for separating the cappings from the honey they contain is on the way; but as yet it is far from perfect.

The care of the honey between the extractor and its being placed in packages for market is also receiving now a considerable amount of attention. Some beekeepers think that the honey may bo improved by evaporation. Of this the writer is rather sceptical. Much, however, I think can be done by gravitation in the receiving tank. As is well known, the riper the honey is the heavier it is, and consequently the thinner and less ripe honey will rise to the surface; as also will all foreign matter, such as chips of wax. Advantage can be token of this, and the honey drawn through a honey-gate on a level with the Irottom of the vat, and tUe surface honey left in the vat until there is a fear of granulation. IN A BEE-CAMP “’Tie a good thing—life; but ye never know how good, really, till you’ve followed the bees to the heather.” It was an old saying of the bee-master’s, and it came again slowly from his lips now, as he knelt by the camp-fire, watching the caress of the flames round the bubbling pot. Wo were in the heart of the Sussex moorland, miles away from the nearest village, still farther from the groat l)ee farm where, at other times, the old man drove his thriving trade. But the bees were hero—n million of them, perhaps—all singing their loudest, in the blossoming heather that stretched away on every side to the far horizon, under the sweltering August sun.

Getting the bees to the moors was always the chief event of the year down at the honey farm. For days the waggons stood by the lam-side, all ready to be loaded up with the best and most populous hives; but the exact moment of departure depended on one very uncertain factor. The white-clover crop was almost at an end. Vvr»rtr rlnv rhw t.ho on’nfntn narrowing, as the sheepfolds closed in upon it. leaving nothing but bare yellow waste, where had been a rolling sea of crimson blossom. But the charlock lay on every hillside like cloth-of-gold. Until harvest was done the fallows wore safe from the ploughshare, and what proved little else than a troublesome weed to the farmer was like golden guineas growing to every keeper of bees

But at last the new moon brought a sharp, chilly night with it, and the longawaited signal was given. Coming down with the first grey glint of morning from the little room under the thatch, I found the bee-garden in a swithcr of commotion. A faint smell of carbolic wgs on thc % air, and the shadowy figures of the bee-master and his men were hurrying .from hive to hive, taking off the super-racks that stood on many three and four storeys high. The heney-barrows went tef and fro, groaning under their burdens; and the earliest bees, roused from their rest by this unwonted turmoil, filled the grey dusk with their high, timorous note. The bee-master came over to me in his white overalls, a weird apparition in the half-darkness.

“ ’Tis the honey-dew,” he said, out of breath, as he passed by. ,! The first cold night of summer brings it out thick on every oak-leaf for miles around; and if we don’t get the supers off before the bees can gather it, the honey will be blackened and spoiled for the market.” He carried a curious bundle with him, an armful of fluttering pieces of calico, and I followed him as ho went to work on a fresh row of hives. From each bcc-dweil-ing the roof was thrown off, the inner coverings removed, and one of the squares of cloth—damned with the carbolic solution—quickly drawn over the topmost rack. A sudden fearsome buzzing uprose within, and then a sudden silence. There is nothing in the world a bee dreads more than the smell of carbolic acid. In a lew seconds the super-racks wore deserted, the bees crowding down into the lowest depths of the hives. The creaking barrows went down the long row in the track of the master, taking up the heavy racks as they passed. Before the sun was well up over the hill-brow the last load had been safely gathered in, .and the chosen hives were being piled into the waggons, ready for the long day’s journey to the moors. All this was but a week ago; yet it might have been a week of years, so completely had these rose-red highland solitudes accepted our invasion, and absorbed us into their daily round of sun and song. Here, in a green hollow of velvet turf, right in the heart of the wilderness, the camp hud been pitched—the white belltents, with their skirts drawn up, showing the spindle-legged field-bedsteads within; the filling-house, made of lath and gauze, where the racks'could be emptied and recharged with the little white wood sectionboxes, safe from marauding bees; the honcv-storc, with its bceproof crates steadily mounting one upon the other, laden with rich brown heather-honey—the finest sweet-food in the world. And round the camp, in a vast'spreading circle, stood tho hives—loo or more—knee-deep in the rosy thicket, each facing outward, and each a whirling vortex of life from early dawn to the last amber gleam of sunset abiding under the flinching silver of the stars. The camp-fire crackled and hissed, and the pot sent forth a savoury steam into the morning air. From the heather the deep chant of busy thousands came over on the wings of the breeze, bringing with it the very spirit of serene content. The beemaster rose and stirred tho pot rnminatively.

“B’ilcd rabbit!” said lie, looking up, with the light of old • memories coming in his gnarled brown face. “And forty years ago, when I first came to the heather, it used to bo b’iled rabbit too. Wo could set a snare in those days as well as now. But ’twas only a few hives then, a dozen or so of old straw skeps on a barrow, and naught but the starry night for a roof-tree, or a sack or two to keep off the rain. IN'onc of your women’s luxuries in those times!’’

Ho looked round rather disparagingly at his own tent, with its plain truckle-bed and tin wash-bowl, and other deplorable signs of effeminate eelf-indulgence. “But there was one thing," he went on, “one thing wc uecd to bring to the moors that never comes now. And that was the basket of sulphur-rag. When the honeyflow is done, and the waggons come to fetch us home again, all the hives will go back to their places in the garden none the worse for their trip. But in the old days of bec-burning never a bee of all the lot returned from the moors. Come a little way into the long grass yonder, and I’ll show ye the way of it.”

With a stick he thrashed about in the dry bents, and soon lay bare a row of circular cavities in the ground. They were almost choked up with moss and the rank undergrowth of many years; but originally they must have been each about lOin broad by as many deep. “Those,” said the bee-master, with a shame-faced air of confession, “were the sulphur-pits. 1 dug them the first year I ever brought hives to the heather; and here, for twenty seasons or more, some ot the finest and strongest stocks in Sussex were regularly done to death. ’Tie a drab tale to tell, out we knew no better then. To get the honey away from the bees looked well-nigh impossible with thousandi of them clinging all over the combs. And it never occurred to any 'of us to try the other way, and get the bece to leave the honey. Yet bee-driving, ’tie the simplest tiding in the world, as every village lad knows to-day.”

Wo strolled out- amongst, the hives, and the boo-master began his leisurely morning round of inspection. In the bee-camp, life and work alike took their time from the slew march of the.summer sun. deliberate, imperturbable, across the pathless heaven 'ldic bees alone keep up the heat and burden of the day. While they were charging in and out of the hives, possessed with a perfect fury of labour, the long hours of sunshine went by for us in immemorial calm. Like the steady rise and fall of a windless tide, darkness and day succeeded one another; and the morning splash in the dew-pond on the top of the hill, and the song by the camp-fire at night, seemed divided only by a dim. formless span, too uneventful and happy to bo called by the old portentous name of Time.—“Beomaster of Warrilow."