AUSTRALIAN BEE LORE AND BEE CULTURE 



CHAPTER II. 



INTRODUCTION OF THE ITALIAN BEE, 



Under the foregoing adverse circumstances thinking men 

 looked around for something that would be the salvation of the 

 bees, It was long believed that the Italian bee (Apis ligustiea) 

 was an insect far superior in many ways to the English bee (Apis 

 mellifica). Not only was it superior as a honey-gatherer, but it 

 was reported to be far more alert, and more persevering in resisting 

 tho attacks of enemies, more especially the bee moth, which in 

 England is known as the wax moth. So great was the onslaught 

 with these moth pests that people owning as many as 200 colonies in 

 a few years found themselves without a single bee. How to con- 

 tend against this pest was an unsolved problem. The bar-frame 

 style of hive was then little known, and the method of fighting' the 

 moth in the gin-oase hives was not understood ; and so it remains 

 to this day. Not only were the bees kept in the crude 

 methods of the day decimated by this pest, but those that had 

 taken to bush life suffered, perhaps, to a greater extent than those 

 more immediately under the control of man. On the Clarence 

 River, to my knowledge, in the latter part of the sixties, it was not 

 unusual for men to take a horse and dray and go in search of bees' 

 nests, returning with two or three hundredweights of honey. 

 Neither was it an unusual thing to find two or three bees' nests in 

 the same tree. But in later years these, through the ravages of the 

 bee moth, have nearly all disappeared. From the general slaughter 

 among the bees caused by the pest named, some few bee-keepers, 

 with more watchfulness than others, saved a few colonies out of 

 the general wreck. To perpetuate and multiply these was the 

 question of questions. The Italian bee was looked to for over- 

 coming the trouble, and enthusiastic beekeepers were not long in 

 importing the far-famed golden and leather coloured Italian bees. 



In the Australian Bee Manual by Isaac Hopkins of New 

 Zealand, the introduction of the Italian bee in the Southern Hemis- 

 phere is thus referred to: — "It was stated by Dr. Gerstaecker that 

 four stocks of Ligurian bees were shipped in England by Mr. J. 

 W. Woodbury, in September, 1862, and that they arrived safely in 



