PEARCE METHOD OF BEE-KEEPING 25 



have increase enough or do not want to make any increase, 

 all you have to do is to keep on your surplus receptacles till 

 later, then remove and cover with good porous material for 

 the coming winter and again in good season put on your sur- 

 plus cases. So you see you have increase or no increase, as 

 you yourself determine, a thing not dreamed of when I 

 started bee keeping years ago. 



CHAPTER IX 

 The Real Mission of the Bees. 



We have all of us been, I think, inclined to look upon the 

 bees as gatherers of honey, mainly as this is what they were 

 made for and there has been some good reason for this for 

 the honey has been the thing which they produce that we all 

 have had our eye on and it has appealed to our taste as well. 

 But the polen they bring in is not so attractive to us. We 

 have looked upon it as a by-product rather in the way as we 

 used to get our honey. We formerly used to call it bee bread. 



Even Dr. Watts (that almost matchless poet) wrote for 

 us those memorable lines. "How doth the little busy bee 

 improve each shining hour and gathers honey all the day 

 from every opening flower." But he does not say a word 

 about the polen she gathers, although he seemed to have 

 knowledge enough of the bee, even at that early day to know 

 that it was the lady side of the house that did all the work. 

 As he wrote : "How skillfully she builds her cell. How neat 

 she spreads her wax. And labors hard to store it well with 

 the sweet food she makes." But not a word about polen. 

 And yet it seems that polen gathering and polen distribution 

 is the real great work for which the bees were designed, 

 because it has been made by the great designer, imperative 

 in two ways : That the bees must have and use polen. In the 

 iirst place, the bees cannot rear their young without this 

 polen ; and in the second place the honey is placed below the 

 polen and in going down after the honey, her head comes in 

 contact with the polen which she hastens to deposit fresh 

 on the next blossom. No other agency known can do this 

 work so perfectly and economically as the so-called honey 

 bee. As she does not allow this polen to get stale, for every 

 so often she rubs off this stale polen and places it in her hip 

 pockets and when she gets a load of honey she carries it 

 home to feed the babies on, for honey alone seems to be too 

 strong, or something, and so imperative is this need for 

 something to mix with honey, that in the spring before the 



