JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
Apri 6, 1882.] 
289 
HE BEE-KEEPER. 1 
BONNER THE SCOTTISH BEE-MASTER. 
Bonner’s name is so much more widely known thm his works 
on bee-keeping that I doubt not many readers of our Journal will 
be glad of a few notes culled from his rare book. Bonner was 
the twelfth child of a handloom weaver of Coldingham in Ber¬ 
wickshire, and seems to have received a fair education. He 
followed his father’s occupation, and became the author of a work 
called “ Practical Warping Made Easy.” His father was an 
enthusiastic bee-keeper, owning as many as a dozen of hives at a 
time, and in good seasons made as much money by his bees as 
nearly purchased oatmeal sufficient to serve his numerous family 
for the whole year. He purchased with a single season’s wax a 
large quarto Bible (an expensive article in those days), “ which 
served as a family book ever after,” and his home was always 
well supplied with honey and mead. The old man worked at his 
loom till within a few days of his death in the eighty-sixth year 
of his age. 
James, our author, was thus a born bee-master, and so great 
was his interest in bees that he, about the year 1765, travelled all 
the way to London to get a chance of conversing with the famous 
Wild man. The latter happening at the time to be in France 
Bonner had to return without seeing him, but he solaced himself 
by the possession of a rich haul of bee books picked up on London 
bookstalls. He tells us he bought every book on bees that he 
could lind. After this, and under the impulse of fresh discoveries 
day by day, he became so absorbed in his studies and experiments 
that during the honey season he hardly took any sleep for whole 
weeks together. At last, in 1789, he published his first book, a 
“ Treatise on the Management of Bees,” which was w T ell received. 
In succeeding years he made so many discoveries and improve¬ 
ments that he resolved to embody all he knew in the larger work 
by which he is better known, “ A New Plan for Speedily In¬ 
creasing the Number of Hives in Scotland,” &c. This work was 
issued by subscription in 1795, and was directly under the patron- 
of the “ lords and gentlemen ” of the Highland Society, the then 
representative of the great Agricultural Society of the present 
day, at whose shows the bee tent is a regular attraction. 
As affording a fair contrast between the best principles of bee¬ 
keeping in last century and those of the present day, I note a few 
of the more prominent of Bonner’s ideas. 
Honeydem. —He speaks of it as an exudation of the saccha¬ 
rine juices of plants, which in some cases it undoubtedly is, but 
seems to have no idea that the bulk of it is the excretion of 
aphides. 
Crude and Perfect Honey. —He decidedly differs from Mr. 
Pettigrew in this matter, having satisfied himself that the nectar 
as gathered from the flowers is true honey, afterwards thickening 
only from the evaporation of its watery particles. I had an illus¬ 
tration only yesterday of one way in which bees get rid of the 
superfluous water in the sweets they gather. Over a large feeding 
trough where I was supplying my bees with sweetened water I 
could see in the sunlight that almost every bee that rose with its 
load ejected a spray of water. So rapidly did the water find its 
way from the honey sac to the excretory organs of the bee that 
the moment it rose it was enabled to get rid, I should suppose, of 
half the weight of its burden in the form of water. I have also 
noticed this in the case of bees returning from the fields during 
the honey season. 
Pollen and Wax. —Although humouring the prevailing notion 
that the bees gathered wax and carried it home on their legs, by 
culling loads of pollen and loads of wax, Bonner argues very sen¬ 
sibly his opinion that wax is an exudation from the body of the 
bee, as milk from the cow, silk from the spider and silkworm, or 
wax from the human ear. 
“ Smotheration ” by Brimstone. —This he utterly condemns as “ a 
barbarous practice ” to be ever deprecated. Who would have 
supposed that such a practice could have continued to the present 
day ?—William Raitt, Blairgomie. 
(To be continued.) 
British Bee-Keepers’ Association. —The next quarterly con¬ 
versazione will be held on Wednesday, April 12th, at 6 P.M., in the 
Board-room of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to 
Animals, at 105, Jermyn Street. S.W., near Piccadilly Circus. Subject 
for discussion—“ A Bee-keeper’s Experiences in Cyprus and Syria,” 
to be introduced by Mr. Thos. B. Blow, Welwyn, Herts. The quarterly 
meeting of representatives of county associations will take place on 
the same date, at the above-mentioned address, at 4 o’clock in the 
afternoon. Entry forms, with rules and regulations, of the Economic 
Apiaries Competition, the entries for which close on May 1st, may 
now be obtained upon application to the Assistant Secretary, Mr. J. 
Huckle, King’s Langley, Herts. 
JUDICIAL DECISION IN WESTPHALIAN BEE 
LAWSUIT. 
[ Translated from the “Bienenzeitvng,” January,1882. Communicated 
by Alfred Neighbour .] 
The Royal High Court of Justice here has recorded a judgment 
which is of great importance to bee-keepers. For more than fifteen 
years many bee-keepers of Rhineland and Westphalia had been in the 
habit of removing their bees to the fields of a farmer whose estate 
was adjoining a moor belonging to the brothers Yon Raesfeld, which 
was visited by the bees in their search for honey. The brothers Yon 
Raesfeld objected to this, and summoned the bee-keepers for trespass, 
but the case was dismissed. Thereupon they ordered some boxes to 
be exposed on the heath. The inside of these was covered with 
honey, and when a considerable number of bees had collected there 
the lids of the boxes were closed and the bees killed with brimstone 
by men specially engaged for the work. This conduct was the cause 
of an action by the bee-keepers against the Raesfelds, who were con¬ 
demned by the Court to pay damages at the rate of M. 5.80 per hive, 
amounting in all to nearly M. 5000.*— The Editor of “The Bien- 
ENZEITUNG.” 
THE INTERNATIONAL BEE-KEEPERS’ CONGRESS 
AND EXHIBITION OF BEES AND THEIR PRODUCTS 
AT MILAN. 
The Congress took place in the splendidly decorated hall of the 
Technical Institute, No. 4, Piazza Cavour, on the 15th, 16th, and 17th 
September last, and was attended by about three hundred bee¬ 
keepers. The transactions at Milan did not commence until eight 
o’clock in the evening, continuing till after midnight, while the day¬ 
time was occupied in visiting the Grand National Exhibition and the 
objects of interest in the city, and in making excursions into the 
surrounding lovely country, and visiting a few of the largest apiaries. 
> Mr. Edward Bertrand of Nyon commenced his very interesting 
discourse on “ breeding queens ” by saying that this was a particu¬ 
larly fit subject of discussion for the Congress of Milan, Italy being 
the country from which beautifully coloured queens are dispatched 
to all parts of the world. The rearing of queens for export, he 
continued, had become quite a branch of industry in Italy, and 
the Italian bee-masters ought to endeavour to maintain the good 
name of their breed of queens ; it would further be necessary, he 
remarked, that those who procure queens from a foreign country 
should be fully convinced that the queens they receive from Italy 
really possess all the good qualities which will secure pure offspring. 
He had unfortunately experienced in the last few years that some 
queens which he had obtained from Italy died in the first year, while 
other queens turned out not to be very prolific, so that their colonies 
yielded but poor returns. He added that similar complaints had 
been made in Germany and America, and many bee-keepers, there¬ 
fore, justly preferred those queens of the Italian race which had not 
been reared in Italy. Mr. Bertrand read a letter from Mr. Newman, 
the Editor of the American Bee Journal of Chicago, in which the 
latter requests the Italian bee-keepers to devote the greatest care to 
the rearing of queens. 
Mr. Bertrand considers it very important, in order to rear service¬ 
able queens, that—1, The parents, both queens and drones, should be 
selected. 2, There should be a large number of young bees in the 
hives used for breeding, because young bees are very apt to supply 
the larvae with plenty of food. 3, There should be a large population 
in a stock in which queens are to be reared. He objects to queen¬ 
breeding in small colonies, because it would produce queens of a 
weak constitution, which on this account would not be very fertile. 
While on this subject the speaker mentioned that in Germany the 
great masters of bee-keeping, Dr. Dzierzon, Gravenhorst, and Dathe, 
first allow the royal cells to be sealed in colonies with large popula¬ 
tions, and afterwards proceed to make small colonies in which to allow 
the queens to hatch. 4, The queen should only be allowed to breed 
during the time when the bees are able to obtain a good supply of 
honey. He and other bee-masters of his acquaintance had frequently 
observed that queens reared early in spring or in autumn deposited 
but few eggs and often died after the first year. He did not believe 
that feeding was a remedy in the absence of the other conditions— 
viz., warm weather and a plentiful supply of pollen. 5, Those larvae 
which are chosen by the workers for rearing queens should not be 
more than a day old, in order that they may receive a plentiful 
supply of royal jelly as long as possible. 
This discourse, which lasted over an hour, was followed by a debate 
of considerable length. I will only mention that Count Barbo ex¬ 
pressed the opinion that Italian queens sent to foreign countries 
often do not give the desired results because of the frequently great 
difference in the climate and vegetation as compared with Italy. 
• This shows there must have been nine hundred stocks of bees on one farm 
—A. N. 
