There are three great tokens of the coming of spring in the country—the elm-blossom, the cry of the young lambs, and the first rich song of the awakening bees.

All three come together about the end of February or beginning of March, and break into the winter dearth and silence in much the same sudden, unpremeditated way. You look at the woodlands, cowering under the lash of the shrill north wind, and all seems bare and black and lifeless. But the wind dies down in a fiery sunset. With the darkness comes a warm breath out of the west. On the morrow the spring sunshine runs high through all the valleys like liquid gold; the elm-tops are ablaze with purple; from the lambing-pens far and near a new cry lifts into the still, warm air; and in the bee-gardens there is the unwonted, old-remembered symphony, prophetic of the coming summer days.

The shepherd, the bee-man, the woodlander—these three live in the focus of the seasons, and feel their changes long before any other class of country folk. But the bee-man, if he would prosper, must take the sun as his veritable daily guide from year’s end to year’s end. Those whose conception of a bee-keeper is mainly of one who looks on from his cottage door while his winged thousands work for him, and who has but to stretch out his hand once a year to gather the hoard he has had no part in winning, know little of modern beemanship. This would be almost literally true of the old skeppist days, when bees were left much to their own devices, and thirty pounds of indifferent honey was reckoned a good take from a populous hive. But the modern movable comb-frame has altered all that. Now ninety or a hundred pounds weight of honey per hive is expected, with ordinarily good seasons, on a well-managed bee-farm; and in exceptional honey-flows very strong stocks of bees have been known to double and even treble that amount.

The movable comb-frame has three prime uses. The hives can be opened at any time and their condition ascertained without having to wait for outside indications. Brood-combs, with the young bees all ready to hatch out, can be taken from strong colonies and given to weak ones, and thus the population of all stocks may be equalised. The filled honeycombs can be removed, emptied by the centrifugal extractor, and the combs returned to the hive ready for another charge; and so the most onerous and exacting labour of the hive, comb-building, is largely obviated.

The modern beehive has another great advantage over the old straw skep, in that its size can be regulated according to the needs of each colony. More combs can be added as the stock grows, and thus no limit is set to its capacity. With the ancient form of hive fifteen or twenty thousand bees meant a crowded citadel, and there was nothing for it but to relieve the congestion by swarming. But the swarming habit has always been the principal obstacle to large honey-takes; and the problem which the modern bee-keeper has to solve is how to prevent his stocks from thus breaking themselves up into several hopelessly weak detachments.

It is all a war of wits between the bees and their masters. In nature the honey-bee is possessed of an inveterate caution. Famine is especially dreaded, and the number of mouths to fill in a hive is always kept strictly to the limits of the incoming food-supply. Thus a natural bee-colony is seldom ready for the honey-flow when it begins in early April, because it is only then that the raising of the young brood is allowed its fullest scope. This, however, is of no importance as far as the bees themselves are concerned, for a balance of stores of about twenty pounds weight at the end of a season will safely carry the most populous colony through any ordinary winter.

But from the bee-master’s point of view it means practically a lost harvest. All the arts and devices of the modern bee-keeper, therefore, are set to work to overcome this timid conservatism of the hives, and to induce the creation of immense colonies of worker-bees as early as possible in the season, so that there may be no lack of labourers when the harvest is ready.

These first warm days of March, that bring the elm-blossom, and the cry of the lambs, and the old sweet music of the bee-gardens together, really form the most critical time of all for the apiarist who depends on his honey for his bread-and-butter. It is the natural beginning of the bee-year, and on his skill as a craftsman from now onward all chance of a prosperous season will rest. It is true that, within the hive, the bees have been awake and stirring for a long time past. Ever since the “turn of the days,” just before Christmas, the queen-mother has been busy; and now there are young bees, little grey fluffy creatures, everywhere in the throng; and the area of sealed brood-cells is steadily growing. But it is only now that the world out-of-doors becomes of any interest to the bees.

This is the time when the scientific bee-man must get to work. His whole policy is one of benevolent fraud. He knows that the population in his hives will not be allowed to increase until there is a steady, assured income of nectar and pollen. He cannot create an early flower-crop, but he does almost the same thing. Every hive is supplied with a feeding-stage, where cane-sugar syrup, of nearly the same consistency as the natural flower-secretion, is administered constantly; and he places trays full of pea-flour at different stations amongst his hives, as a substitute for pollen. There is a special art in the administration of this sugar-syrup. One might think that if the bees required feeding at all, the more they were given the better they would thrive. But experience is all against this notion. The artificial food is given, not to replenish an exhausted larder, but to simulate a natural new supply. This, in the ordinary state of things, would begin in about a month’s time, coming at first scantily, and gradually increasing. By syrup-feeding early in March, the bee-master sets the clock of the year forward by many weeks. He imitates nature by arranging his feeding-stages so that the supply of syrup can be limited to the actual day-to-day wants of the colony, allowing the bees freer access to the syrup-bottles from time to time as their numbers augment.

If this is adroitly done, the effect on the colony is remarkable. The little company of bees whose part it is to direct the actions of the queen-mother, seeing what is apparently the natural fresh supply of food coming in, in daily increasing quantities, at length cast their hereditary reserve aside, and allow the queen fullest scope for egg-laying. The result is that by the time the real honey-flow commences the population of each hive is double what it would be if it had been left to its own resources, and the honey-yield is more than proportionately great. It is well know among bee-men that a hive containing, say, forty thousand workers will produce very much more honey than two hives together numbering twenty thousand each.

There is another vital consideration in this work of early stimulation of the hives, which the capable bee-master will never neglect. When the natural honey-glut is on, the whole hive reeks with the odours given off from the evaporating nectar. The raw material, as gathered from the flowers, must be reduced by the heat of the hive and other agencies to about one-quarter of its original bulk before it is changed into mature honey. The artificial food given to the bees will, of course, have none of this scent, and the old honey-stores in the hive are hermetically sealed under their waxen cappings. To complete the deception which has been so elaborately contrived, the bee-master must furnish his hives with a new atmosphere. This he does by slicing off the cappings from some of the old store-combs, thus letting out their imprisoned fragrance, and filling the hive at once with the very essence of the clover-fields where the bees worked in the bygone summer days. The smell of the honey at this time, combined with the regular and increasing supply of syrup, acts like a powerful stimulant on the whole stock, and the work of brood-raising goes rapidly forward.

In intensive culture of all kinds there are risks to be run peculiar to the artificial state of things engendered, and modern bee-breeding is no exception to the rule. When once this fictile prosperity is installed by the bee-master, no lapse or variation in the due amount of food must occur. Even a single day’s remission of supplies may undo all that a month’s careful manipulation has brought about. English bees understand their native climate only too well, and the bitter experience of former years has taught them to be prepared for a return of hard weather at any moment. Under natural conditions, if a few weeks’ warmth has induced them to raise population, and a sudden return of cold ensues, the bees will take very prompt and stern measures to meet the threatening calamity of starvation. The queen will cease laying at once; all unhatched brood will be ruthlessly torn from its cradle-cells and destroyed; old, useless bees will be expelled from the colony. And this is exactly what will happen if the artificial food-supply is allowed to fail even for the shortest period.