Bees produce swarms, queens, wax and
honey.
The production of swarms and queens
should be left to specialists.
The production of wax has some
value, but this value is diminished by the cost of rendering.
The production of
honey is the main purpose of beekeeping, one that the beekeeper pursues before
everything else, because this product is valuable and because it can be weighed
and priced.
Honey is an
excellent food, a good remedy, the best of all sweeteners. We shall go into
this in more detail. And we can sell honey in many forms just as we can consume
it in many forms: as it is, in confectionery, in cakes and biscuits, in healthy
and pleasant drinks – mead, apple-less cider, grape-less wines.
It is also worth
noting that beekeeping is a fascinating activity and consequently rests both
mind and body.
Furthermore,
beekeeping is a moral activity, as far as it keeps one away from cafés and low
places and puts before the beekeeper an example of work, order and devotion to
the common cause.
Moreover, beekeeping is a
pre-eminently healthy and beneficial activity, because it is most often done in
the fresh air, in fine, sunny weather. For sunshine is the enemy of illness
just as it is the master of vitality and vigour. Dr Paul Carton wrote: 'What is
needed is to educate a generation in disliking alcohol, in despising meat, in
distrusting sugar, in the joy and the great benefit of movement'.
For the human being is a
composite being. The body needs exercise without which it atrophies. The mind
needs exercising too, otherwise it deteriorates. Intellectuals deteriorate
physically. Manual workers, behind their machines, suffer intellectual
deterioration.
Working on the land
is best suited to the needs of human beings. There, both mind and body play their
part.
But society needs its thinkers,
its office workers and its machine operatives. Clearly these people cannot run
farms at the same time. But in their leisure time (they must have some of it)
they can be gardeners and beekeepers and at the same time satisfy their human
needs.
This
work is better than all modern sports with their excesses, their promiscuity,
their nudity. Thus if the French were to return to the land they would be more
robust, more intelligent. And as
the wise Engerand said, France would again become the land
of balance where there would be neither the agitations, nor the collective
follies that are so harmful to people; it would become again a land of
restraint and clarity, of reason and wisdom, a country where it is good to live.
And let us not
forget the advice of Edmond About: 'The only eternal, everlasting and
inexhaustible capital is the earth'.
Finally, one more
important thing: the bees fertilise the flowers of the fruit trees. Apiculture
thus contributes greatly to filling our fruit baskets. This reason alone should
suffice to urge all those who have the smallest corner of orchard to take up
beekeeping.
According to
Darwin, self-fertilisation of flowers is not the general rule.
Cross-fertilisation, which takes place most commonly, is necessitated becaus of
the separation of sexes in flowers or even on different
plants; or because of the non-coincidence of maturity of pollen and stigma or
by the different morphological arrangements which prevent self-fertilisation in
a flower. It happens very often that if an outside agent does not intervene,
our plants do not fruit or they yield far less; many experiments demonstrate
this.
As Hommell put it so well: the
bee, attracted by the nectar secreted at the base of the petals, penetrates to
the bottom of the floral envelope to drink the juices produced by the
nectaries, and covers itself with the fertilising dust that the stamens let
fall. Having exhausted the first flower, a second presents a new crop to the
tireless worker; the pollen it is carrying falls on the stigma and the
fertilisation which, without it, would be left at the mercy of the winds, takes
place in a way that is guaranteed. Thus the bee, following its course without
relaxation, visits thousands of corollae, and deserves the poetic name that
Michelet gave it: the winged priest at the marriage of the flowers.
Hommell even attempted to put a
figure on the benefit that resulted from the presence of bees. A colony, he
said, which has only 10,000 foragers should be considered as reaching barely
average, and a large stock housed in a big hive often has 80,000. Suppose
10,000 foragers go out four times a day, then in 100 days this will make four
million sorties. And if each bee before returning home enters only twenty-five
flowers, the bees of this hive will have visited 100 million flowers in the
course of one year. It is no exaggeration to suppose that on ten of these
flowers, at least one is fertilised by the action of the foragers and that the
resulting gain would be only 1 centime for every 1,000 fertilisations. Yet in
spite of these minimal estimates, it is evident that there is a benefit of 100
francs a year produced by the presence of just one hive. This mathematical
conclusion is irrefutable.
Certain fruit producers, above
all viticulturists, set themselves up in opposition to bees because bees come
and drink the sweet juices of fruit and grapes. But if we investigate the bee
closely we soon notice that they ignore the intact fruits and only empty those
with pellicles that are already perforated by birds or by the strong mandibles
of wasps. The bee only gathers juice which, without it, would dry up and be
wasted. It is totally impossible for bees to commit the theft they are accused
of, because the masticatory parts of its mouth are not strong enough to enable
it to perforate the fruit pellicle that protects the pulp.
