November is, 1330 . ] JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
473 
a first swarm on being hived. The queen, healthy and only 
twelve months old, left the stock hive with the swarm, but being 
without a wing she could not fly or follow the swarm. The swarm 
was hived and the queen given to it. In about two hours after I 
saw that somethingfwas wrong, and on lifting the swarm hive I saw 
a regicidal knot on the side of the hive halfway between swarm 
and board. This knot was rolled on to the board and the queen 
liberated. A second time she was encased and liberated, and 
next morning she was found dead under the flight board. Why 
did the bees kill her? I could not tell. Believing that the 
swarm was queenless, I thought the bees would return to the old 
hive, but they remained where they were and commenced to 
work and build combs as if nothing had happened. I gave the 
swarm a piece of comb containing eggs, expecting that royal 
cells would be formed and tenanted, but none were built. I took 
an old queen from a weak stock and gave it to the swarm. She, 
too, was killed and cast out. Meanwhile the swarm prospered 
and had cakes of brood sealed in less than a fortnight from the 
time of swarming. That they had a queen or obtained one in the 
act of swarming there can be no doubt, but where she came from 
was a mystery. There was no other hive in the garden ready for 
swarmiDg. Had I not been on the spot and witnessed the whole 
affair I should have concluded that two swarms came off at the 
same time, but after much consideration I found no evidence to 
support such conjectures. The swarm is now a strong stock. 
Another instance of queen encasement is more easily under¬ 
stood. In August last a gentleman in this neighbourhood begged 
me to drive the bees from one of his honey hives and take them 
for the trouble. After almost all the bees were driven into an 
empty hive an attempt was made to kill and clean out the 
stragglers by sulphur. A small bit of paper sprinkled with sul¬ 
phur was ignited and the hive placed over it. On lifting the hive 
it was found that the sulphured paper had been extinguished 
before the bees were destroyed. On shaking them out it was seen 
that though not killed they were much injured and unable to fly, 
and that the queen, a beautiful half-bred Ligurian, was amongst 
them. She was picked up and given to the driven bees. They 
did not know her and would not have her. She was speedily 
encased by a cluster of bees bent on her destruction. They were 
not disturbed for an hour or more till the smell of sulphur had 
nearly passed from her body. She was then liberated and seen to 
run into the body of the swarm, and is now the queen of a healthy 
stock. 
The conduct of the bees in this case leads me to notice a 
thoughtful remark in Mr. Cheshire’s letter. He says, “ Since bees 
have the power of recognising every member of their own big 
•Lonsehold and distinguishing every stranger, it is quite likely that 
little matters which we cannot detect are to them as conspicuous 
and distinct as facial expression is to us.” This is correctly 
stated. Bees have such powers, and in such cases that of smell 
'seems to be the most powerful and useful. The sulphured queen 
appears to have been detected and rejected by smell, and that the 
sense of sight was not called into play at all ; indeed, for indoor 
work the sense of sight is unnecessary. They possess compen¬ 
satory powers. I think it will be very difficult to prove that bees 
know members of their own family by sight. If they do they 
have short memories, and soon forget them. If a swarm, natural 
or artificial, be taken from a stock hive the bees of the swarm 
would be recognised and received by the mother hive if they 
went back within one or two days, but if kept away for a week 
they would probably be killed at the door of the hive on return¬ 
ing. In uniting swarms the danger of fighting and destruction is 
at the time of uniting. If the two swarms remain for half an hour 
without fighting they become one family to all intents and purposes. 
Smell seems to be the only bond of union.—A. Pettigrew. 
HEATHER HONEY. 
The year 1880 will long be remembered by our highland bee¬ 
keepers as perhaps the most productive honey season ever known 
hitherto. I have just returned from a three-weeks tour, during 
which I have visited the leading bee-keepers along the lines of 
the Highland, Great North, and Deeside Railways, and the general 
testimony has been that never before did bees do so well on the 
Heather. Nor has success been confined to those who practise 
the modern methods of culture, the number of weighty brimstoned 
sleeps being marvellous to see. While our lowland bee-keepers are 
lamenting over a poor yield, those in the highland districts can 
well afford to take heart, for not only has the yield been excep¬ 
tionally large, but the sale of the honey has been such as to make 
it almost impossibe for me to obtain a few supers of which I was 
in need. One bee-keeper of the modern school had not only sold 
all his own to the amount of about £40, but had to purchase 
about as much again to fill orders, and this at a uniform price of 
2s. 6d. per ft. The one condition for securing so satisfactory a 
price was that the genuine Heather honey should be stored in 
neat packages, sections of 1 or 1^ ft. being preferred. Every¬ 
where I have found that a decided preference exists for Heather 
honey, and that double the price of Clover honey is readily ob¬ 
tained for it. The demand is also on the increase, partly because 
of its delicious quality, and partly because the taste for lowland 
honey has to a great extent become cloyed. The latter is often so 
polluted by so-called honeydew, and so nearly resembles the 
insipid American honey, that persons once accustomed to both 
almost invariably settle down on. the Heather as the honey par 
excellence. Such being as I believe the case, a grand opportunity 
is offered of turning to account the thousands of square miles 
of blooming Heather with which our country abounds. How to 
do so to the fullest extent is the problem I would venture to lay 
before my fellow bee-keepers. The bee books and journals give 
us little if any assistance. They do acknowledge the desirability 
of “removing bees to the moors,” but there they halt. They give 
no idea of the special treatment that stocks must receive before 
they can take full advantage of what in most seasons is really a 
harvest “ out of season.” As a rule they give directions only for 
obtaining the largest results from earlier harvests, and as a con¬ 
sequence those who follow their advice find themselves on the 
advent of the Heather season with stocks diminished in popula¬ 
tion, brood-raising almost suspended, and the brood combs glutted 
with honey. It will thus be evident that in such a common 
case only very moderate results can be obtained ; and when 
it is noticed that the population of a hive working on Heather 
dwindles in an exceptionally rapid way, and that the instincts of 
the bee lead it so late in the season to store all it can in the 
brood nest to the exclusion of the queen from laying room, the 
need for some explicit and special rules for working the Heather 
harvest will be evident. In a future issue I hope to contribute 
my share to this end, but meanwhile I shall continue to notice 
such facts as I have observed, and from which qur special rules 
of treatment may be deduced. 
I have found that in purely highland districts late-swarming 
hives yield returns quite as good as those that swarm earlier. 
Their larger proportion of young bees is probably the reason. 
The region of Aboyne and Braemar, where swarms are as late as 
the 1st of August, yields enormous returns. In these districts the 
ordinary dome-shaped skep is the rule, and extension is liberally 
given as required by the addition of wooden ekes. These afford 
the necessary breeding space from time to time, and serve thus to 
maintain the population to the close of the season. 
I have been much interested in finding that bees do work to a 
large extent on the two species of Heather (Erica tetralix and 
E. cinerea) that bloom in July, a month before the common 
Heather. My friend Mr. Paterson of Struan kindly invited me to 
partake of the contents of a 1-ft. section of the whitest comb I 
ever saw, and asked whether I could recognise the source from 
which it had been gathered. In spite of my conceit as a judge of 
honey I had to confess myself at fault. The delicious flavour was 
quite new to me in white honey. He then informed me it was 
gathered from the Bell Heather—the two varieties mentioned 
above—and that his bees had forsaken the Clover to work on it in 
July. A visit to the hill behind his house revealed such a profu¬ 
sion of these Heaths as I had never seen before, and I could not 
wonder again that his honey was in such demand. This discovery 
at once explained what I had often observed, that some districts 
yield Heather honey so much darker in colour than others, the 
darker grades having a decided bitterness and tendency to catch 
the throat quite different from this lighter-coloured quality. 
There is evidently a difference between the honey yield of 
Heather on lowland moors and that on the hills. My own bees 
gathered but sparingly from the moor beside them, and that only 
until the later bloom on the hills appeared. They then almost 
entirely took the opposite direction for the hill, The nearest 
Heather in this direction is between three and four miles distant, 
and gamekeepers assure me that they saw my Ligurians in abun¬ 
dance at five miles off. Others have informed me of finding 
Heather honey in their hives this season for the first time, and in 
some cases the distance must have been even greater than mine 
by a mile or two. As it turned out I had three-fourths of my 
surplus pure Heather. The further we advance inland the more 
abundant seems the flow of nectar, and I could not help lament¬ 
ing over the scores of miles of purple Heather where I was in¬ 
formed that no bees were kept at all. I have had the honour of 
introducing the matter in the far north to the notice of the 
flourishing Farmers’ Society at Inverness. The proposals I made 
for their taking the lead in developing the industry of bee-keeping, 
the public lecture that followed, and the open air manipulation 
