1882-83.] Edinburgh Naturalists Field Club. TJ 



the banks of the Nile. Niebuhr states that he once saw near Cairo 

 a convoy of four thousand hives on the Nile. This practice is also 

 followed by the Italians ; and in France, also, iioating boat-houses 

 for Bees are common. 



Now let us look at home. Under the system of Bee-keeping adopt- 

 ed until within the last few years, hundreds of tons of honey must 

 have been annually wasted. At a recent meeting of the Worces- 

 tershire Bee Association, it was stated that a calculation had been 

 made that Scotland alone could have maintained on its Bee pastures 

 enough Bees to have provided 4,000,000 lb. of honey and 1,000,000 

 lb. of wax. Scarcely a mile from Land's End to John-o'- Groats is 

 properly stocked with Bees ; and in Ireland the land flows with 

 honey, yet for miles you travel without seeing a single Bee-hive. 

 If these little insects were kept, all they would ask would be fair 

 treatment — immunity from the brimstone pit, and a portion of the 

 stores they gather. The science of Bee-keeping is not formidable. 

 What a Eussian, a German, or an American can do, surely we can ; 

 and moreover we are doing it, and making rapid progress — though 

 not rapid enough — in Bee-culture. Bee societies are being estab- 

 lished all over the kingdom. We have here the Caledonian Apiar- 

 ian Society, of which I have been a member from its formation. 

 There is scarcely a county in England now without its Bee Associa- 

 tion, often with a nobleman or noble lady as president ; and the 

 clergy of all denominations, much to their credit, are generally in 

 the van in the movement. I know one parish clergyman in Eng- 

 land, a good carpenter, who makes frame hives and sells them, de- 

 voting the proceeds of his labour to the improvement of his schools, 

 and he feels that he is thus doing good in more ways than one. 

 Mr Cockburn of Keith, the maker of my hive, states, in a recent 

 number of the Journal, that he knows a working man who this year 

 made £20 by his Bees ; and that the Eev. Eobert Grant of the Free 

 Manse, Botriphnie, had a hive which produced 98 lb. of splendid 

 super honey, — and he adds, who will dare to say that Bees' won't 

 pay. But to my mind, to pay well there are three requisites — 

 careful, not difEcult, management ; a fair locality for honey ; and 

 humane treatment. 



The principal aim of Bee societies is to encourage Bee-keeping 

 among artisans and cottagers, to abolish at once and for ever the 

 cruel and unnecessary practice of destroying the Bees to obtain 

 the honey, and to foster among this class habits of thrift and 

 temperance, combined with an intellectual pursuit, to add to their 

 home pleasures, and to make them thus better and more intelligent 

 members of society. We must bear in mind that in Bee-keeping 

 very small space is required. Bees are not deemed trespassers, — 

 there is no Glen Tilt in their case ; but as far as unrestricted range 

 goes, the peasant is on an equality with the peer. Believe me, it 



VOL. I. p 



