The bee-keepers in English villages to-day are all familiar—too familiar at times—with the holiday-making stranger at the garden gate inquiring for honey. Somehow or other the demand for this old natural sweet-food appears to have greatly increased of recent years among wandering townsfolk in the country. A competent bee-master, dealing with a large number of combs, will not mingle them indiscriminately, but will unerringly assort them, so that he will have perhaps at the end of the season almost as many kinds of honey in store as there are fields on his countryside. I speak, of course, not of the large bee-farmer—who, employing of necessity wholesale methods, can aim only at a good all-round commercial sample of no finely distinctive colour or flavour—but of the connoisseur in bee-craft, the gourmet among the hives, who knows that there are as many varieties in honey as there are in wine, and would as little dream of confusing them.

Honey lovers who have been eating wax all their days will be as hardly dissuaded from the practice as he whose custom it may be to consume the paper in which his butter is wrapped, or take a proportion of the blue sugar-bag with the lumps in his tea. Yet the last are no more absurdities than the former, except in degree. Pure beeswax has neither savour nor nutrient properties, and passes wholly unassimilated through the human system. Even the bees themselves cannot feed upon it when at dire extremes: the whole hive may die of starvation in the midst of waxen plenty. Of all creatures, mice, and the larva of two species of moth, alone will make away with it; and even in their case it is doubtful whether the comb be not destroyed for the sake of the odd grains of pollen and the pupa-skins it contains. Broadly speaking, unless you can trust a dipped finger-tip to reveal to you on the moment the qualities of this village-garden honey, it is always safer to buy in the comb. But the wax should never be eaten. The proper way to deal with honeycomb at table is to cut it to the width of the knife-blade; and, laying it upon the plate with the cells vertical, press the blade flat upon it, when the honey will flow out right and left. In this way, if duly carried out, the honey is scientifically separated, no more than one per cent remaining in the slab of wax.

“Honey-Comb: its various stages”

The Bee as a Chemist

It is not strange, because it is so common, to find people who have eaten honeycomb regularly all their lives, yet are unknowingly ignorant of the first rudimentary fact in its nature and composition. To know that you do not know is an intelligible state, the initial true step towards knowledge; but to be full of erroneous information, and that complacently, is to be ignorant indeed. Of such are the old lady who dwelt in the Mile End Road, and believed that cocoanuts were monkeys’ eggs, and the man who will tell you without expectancy of contradiction that honey is the food of bees.

Now this is no essay in cheap paradox, but a sober attempt to reinstate in the public mind the unsophisticated truth. The natural foods of the bee-hive are the nectar and the pollen, the “love ferment” of the flowers. On these the bee subsists entirely, so long as she can obtain them, and will go to her honey stores only when nature’s fresh supplies have failed. One speaks by poetic licence, or looseness, of bees gathering honey from blossoming plants. The fact is they do nothing of the kind, and never did. The sweet juices of clover, heather, and the like, differ fundamentally, both in appearance and in chemical properties from honey. Though the main ingredient in honey is nectar, the two are totally different things; and honey, far from being the normal food of bees, is only a standby for hard times, a sort of emergency ration, put up in as little compass and with as great a concentration as such things can be.

The story of how honey is made, and why it is made at all, forms one of the most interesting items in the history of the hive-bee. In a land where nectar-yielding plants flourish all the year through, if such a spot exist at all, there would be no honey, because the necessity for it would not occur. Hive-bees in such a land would go all their lives, and assuredly never dream of honey-making. But wherever there is winter, or a season when the supply of nectar and pollen temporarily fails, the bee, who does not hibernate in the common sense of the term, must devise a means of supporting life through the famine period. Many creatures can and do accomplish this by merely laying up in a comatose condition until such time as their natural food is plentiful again, and they may safely resume their old activities. But this will not do for the doughty honey-bee. A curious aspect of her life is the way in which she appears to recognise the competitive spirit in all the higher forms of earthly existence, and deliberately sets herself in the fore-rank of affairs with that principle in view. It would be easy for a few hundred worker-bees to get together in some warm nook underground, with that carefully tended piece of egg-laying mechanism, their queen, in their midst; and in a semi-dormant condition to pass the dark winter months through, gradually rousing their own fires of life as the year warmed up again in the spring. But such a system would mean that the colony would have to start afresh from the bottom of the ladder of progress with every year. The hive-bee has conceived a better plan, and the basis, the essential factor of it all, is this thing of mystery which we call honey.

The True Purpose of the Hive

The ancient Roman name for a beehive was alvus, which, translated into its blunt Anglo-Saxon equivalent, means belly. And this gives us in a word the whole secret about honey-making. As a matter of fact, the hive in summer acts as a digestive chamber, wherein the winter aliment of the stock is prepared. The bees, during their ordinary workaday life, subsist on the nectar and pollen which they are continually bringing into the hive. Much pollen is laid by in the cells in its raw condition, but pollen is almost exclusively a tissue-former, and it is not used by the worker-bees during the winter for their own sustenance, but preserved until early spring, when it forms the principal component in the bee-milk on which the larvÆ are mainly fed. The nectar, however, is necessary at all times to support life in the mature bees, and it must therefore be stored for use during the long months when there are no flowers to secrete it.

It is here that we get a glimpse into the ways of the honey-bee that may well give spur to the most wonder-satiated amongst us. If a sample of fresh nectar is examined, it will be found to consist of about seventy per cent of water, the small remainder of its bulk being made up of what is chemically known as cane sugar, together with a trace of certain essential oils and aromatic principles. It is practically nothing but sweetened and flavoured water. But ripe honey shows a very different composition. The oils and essences are there, with some added acids; but of water there is no more than seven to ten per cent; practically the entire bulk of good honey consists of sugar, but it is grape sugar, with scarce a trace of the cane sugar which nectar exclusively contains. To put the thing in plainest words—the economic honey-bee, finding herself with three or four months to get through at the least possible cost in energy and nutriment, has scientifically reasoned out the matter, and, among other ingenious provisions, has arranged to subject her winter food to a process of pre-digestion during the summer, so that when she consumes it there shall be neither force expended in its assimilation nor waste products taken with it, needing to be afterwards expelled. Honey, in fact, is the nectar digested, and then regurgitated just when it is ready to be absorbed into the system. It is almost certain that every drop goes through this process twice, and possibly three times, in each case by different bees; and the heat of the hive still further contributes to the object in view by driving off the superfluous moisture from the nectar so treated, and thus concentrating it into an almost perfect food.