1919 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



195 



arates them virtually from their Holy 

 Land sisters. 



The bright golden crescent of the 

 Cyprians becomes darker, though 

 still visible, and the orange color of 

 the insect changes into pale citron: 

 tlic workers are a trifle smaller. Xo 

 change as to liveliness of character 

 worth mentioning. The Syrian drones 

 are bright-colored, with brown spots. 



Syrian workers fly out early and 

 come home late, and if given the oc- 

 casion, can gather as much honey as 

 Cyprians or Holy Lands. Beyrout, 

 where I had an apiary for several 

 seasons, is not much of a bee pastur- 

 age, as the houses and villas are usu- 

 ally surrounded by mulberry trees, 

 for the silk worms, excluding honey- 

 plants, except the cactus hedges 

 (Opuntia) which blossom in May. 



The queens are as prolific as Holy 

 Land queens, moreover, they lay just 

 a few hundred drones less than their 

 Holy Land sisters and, but for a 

 slight difference in color, do not, as 

 a rule, vary. The best stock can be 

 had between Tripoli, Syria, and Bey- 

 rout, along the narrow strip of plain 

 or undulated low lands between the 

 abrupt chains of Lebanon and the 

 sea. 



I am inclined to think that Syrians 

 are not so excitable as their north- 

 ern neighbors, because bee pests 

 abound much more in the south, 

 where nature has bestowed more re- 

 sources to the breeding of the hor- 

 nets and wasps, by way of fruit trees, 

 and to the multiplication of the stel- 

 lion, a thorny lizard, sometimes fat- 

 tening on bees. The stellion is a 

 known feature of the Orient, dark 

 grey in color. He is met with all over 

 the grey rocks in this land of grey- 

 ness. Living on small insects, he 

 may be quite blessing where grass- 

 hoppers and flies of all kinds abound, 

 but what a nuisance to apiaries! He 

 has the advantage of having a gelat- 

 inous substance around his formid- 

 able jaws, in which the bees leave 

 their stings before being swallowed. 

 A captured stellion one day showed 

 us over a dozen bee-stings on his 

 gums and did not seem at all trou- 

 bled by the poison. 



We had an apiary out in the plains 

 of Philistia, near Ekron, famous for 

 the "god of flies" (Baal-Zebub) in 

 ancient times. Stellions were so 

 numerous that we had to dig 

 trenches around the hives to protect 

 them, yet in our absence the 

 trenches were forded and the bees 

 decimated. \Ye carried them to a 

 neighboring house for protection and 

 put wire cloth on the windows, but 

 hornets also assailed the bees. The 

 isolated house was between Gaza and 

 Jaffa, and in our absence an earth- 

 quake buried bees, furniture and 

 house in the rubbish, so hornets and 

 stellions could no longer linger about 

 for them, and, as in olden days, "the 

 land had rest for many months." 



Holy Land workers are slightly 

 smaller than Syrians, and fuzz also is 

 more abundant, and decidedly grey in 

 color. Holy Land queens are hardly 

 to be distinguished from Syrians; 

 some mothers are very small, others 

 larger than Syrians; in color, too, as 



a rule, they are slightly lighter col- 

 ored. The Holy Land bees are now 

 found all over Palestine and the in- 

 habited parts of the Trans-Jordan 

 country; in the north, to the sources 

 of the Jordan ; in the south to Gaza, 

 where the Sinaitic Desert cuts them 

 short ; in the west to the Mediterran- 

 ean, and to the east the Sj'rian and 

 North Arabian deserts oppose their 

 sands to the continuation of bee cul- 

 ture. 



Beekeeping still flourishes in the 

 plains with greater success than in 

 the sterile mountains of Judah. Big 

 apiaries, containing hundreds of clay 

 cylinder hives are met with in most 

 villages of the plains, whilst the tra- 

 ditional apiaries about Jerusalem and 

 Bethlehem, seen by occasional trav- 

 elers, are rather apologies of apiaries 

 to compare with the lowland stock. 

 Bee pasturage is very abundant along 

 the Maritime plains, from February 

 to July or August. Through the long 

 rainless summers, which greatly hin- 

 der the secretion of nectar in orange 

 blossoms, cactus, thyme and lavender, 

 moisture from the dews, which fall 

 heavily in western Palestine, revives 

 the nectaries. 



Holy Land queens, as already 

 stated, differ very slightly from the 

 others, though occasionally a beauti- 

 ful colored orange insect is met with. 

 As a rule, when left to their instincts, 

 they rear about one-fourth of drones. 

 As soon as the colony has reached its 

 full development they are as prolific 

 as the other yellow bees, and more 

 especially, a full colony will raise 

 hundreds of good queen-cells; this is 

 a specialty of Holy Lands. A noted 

 beekeeper visited me one day in 

 Jaffa, when I was in bed with the 

 fever. I jumped up when he told me 

 his name — P. C. Schachinger, of the 

 Bienenzeitung, in Budapest. I showed 

 him a hive bearing his name, and as 

 we hunted the colony for the mother 

 we counted 385 queen-cells, yet the 

 stock did not swarm. To explain, 

 thev would have swarmed if 1 had 



left them alone for any length of 

 time, but I usually made artificial 

 swarms when the colonies had over 

 twenty frames of brood. Sometimes 

 I waited until they had twenty-four, 

 but that only happened in April, dur- 

 ing the orange honey flow. 



The greyish yellow workers are as 

 lively as their yellow sisters, perhaps 

 a little more so, because of the huge 

 hornets which nestle in the sandy 

 plains around fruit-growing locali- 

 ties. When the hornets can find 

 neither bees nor fruit, they feed on 

 carrion, which, in the olden days, 

 was found along the roadsides lead- 

 ing to towns and villages. The bees 

 in the skull of Onesilius reported by 

 Herodotus, the hornets feeding on 

 carrion and cleaning the skeleton in 

 a few days, the foxes and jackals 

 helping them in their work; the ig- 

 norance of beekeeping in biblical 

 days, witness the story of Samson 

 and his swarm in a skeleton, point to 

 the confusion of bees with hornets 

 found in scripture. The honeybee 

 was brought to Palestine either from 

 Egypt or Assyria, or from both, for 

 as late as King Ahaz, of Judah, more 

 than four centuries after the Sam- 

 sonian epoch, Isaiah says : "And it 

 shall come to pass in that day. that 

 the Lord shall hiss for the fly that 

 is in the uttermost parts of the riv- 

 ers of Egypt, and for the bee, that is 

 in the land of Assyria, and they shall 

 come and shall rest all of them in 

 the desolate valleys, in the holes of 

 the rocks and upon all thorns, and 

 upon all bushes." (Isaiah vii. 18-19.) 

 The Hebrews only knew Deborah, 

 the bee or hornet, whilst the Arabs 

 call bees Nahel, and the hornets Da- 

 bour. Now the word "Nahel" derived 

 from the verb "nah," to sigh, to 

 mourn, is of Egyptian importation. 

 In the hieroglyphics, the bee is rep- 

 resented as the sigher, the mourner 

 for the departed, on account of the 

 sighing sound which is heard at the 

 hive entrance. 



The bees have thus taken the road 



Camel carrying 600 pound 



