AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
139 
Wonders of the Bee Hive — XI. 
Fire is said to be a good servant but a bad mas- 
tor ; and with a similar contrast we may speak of 
the honey-bee as an excellent servant, but a ter¬ 
rible foe, Small as it is, it is capable both of con¬ 
tributing greatly to our enjoyment, and of inflict¬ 
ing injuries which few would care to receive. 
“ They compassed me about, they compassed 
me about like bees,’’ was the vivid description 
given of old by one who had been beset by foes ; 
but blows, and wounds from stones and clubs and 
arrows and javelins, are hardly to be compared 
with the innumerable stings which may be inflict¬ 
ed by these tiny insects, searching out in their an¬ 
ger, every part of the body, and leaving abundant 
room for hundreds more to participate in the at¬ 
tack. 
The sting of the bee is a formidable weapon, 
the fear of which gives the hive protection from 
the attacks of men and of animals. Yet it seldom 
has occasion for the use of this dreaded imple¬ 
ment. It does not go about the meadows seeking 
for opportunities to worry horses and cattle, 
and distress the poor innocent sheep, or 
persecute the cats or the poultry. No creature 
more faithfully minds its own business, and lets 
every body else alone, than “ the lititle busy bee.” 
And of the thousands of bees in a hive, 
all armed with the same weapon, and equally 
capable of employing it with effect, very few ever 
find occasion to use it. And in swarming time, 
when more than at any other season, some care 
must be shown the bees by those who wish to en¬ 
joy the fruits of their labors, it is exceedingly 
rare for them to be provoked to anger. 
The weapon itself, however, would occasion 
us very little inconvenience, were it not for the 
poison which flows, through it. The pain produc¬ 
ed by a very fine needle penetrating the skin for 
ore-twelfth of an inch, could be easily borne, but 
if the needle were a hollow tube, through which 
a concentrated poison was forcibly thrown into 
the pores of the skin, and thence rapidly diffused 
through all the surrounding parts, it would be 
quite a different matter. And, after all, it is the 
venom, rather than the sting itself, that makes it 
desirable for us to keep the bees good-natured. 
We have an engraving of the sting and its ap¬ 
pendages, (fig. 17) that may interest some of our 
readers. We will refer them first, however, to 
fig 3, page 9, Jan. No., where similar parts of the 
insect are introduced. There, A represents the 
poison bag, which is supplied from the tube below 
it, of which, indeed, it is an eidargement. C in¬ 
dicates the muscles that move the sting whose 
barbed point is seen projecting below. 
In fig. 17, A is seen in a different position, and 
the tube descending from it can be traced to the 
very extremity of the figure. When we look at 
a bee's sting with the unaided eye, the closest ex¬ 
amination does not detect any roughness or un¬ 
evenness in its polished point, but the microscope 
shows that it is furnished with barbs like a fish¬ 
hook, so that when once it has pierced the skin it 
is not easily withdrawn. These barbs are at¬ 
tached to two separate shanks which close to¬ 
gether, but move independently. A two-fold ap¬ 
pendage is seen above the point, whose use is un¬ 
known ; and still higher up, on either side are the 
muscles and cartilages that thrust the barbs up¬ 
ward. Swammerdam, from whom this figure is 
copied, says, that after dissecting these parts, he 
has found the poison bag A so strong and firm, 
that by pressing it with his fingers as hard as he 
could, the poison might be thrown to the distance 
of two feet from it through the sting. And so, 
no sooner have the barbs worked their way into 
the flesh, than the venom is ejected into the 
wound they are making, and in some mysterious 
manner is distributed through the surrounding 
glands, causing oftentimes severe pain and enor- 
Fig. 17- THE STINO AND ITS APPENDAGES. 
mous swellings, which may not subside for eight- 
and-forty hours. 
It is frequently the case that the bee, in attempt¬ 
ing to withdraw its sting from a wound, leaves 
it there with its accompanying parts. Of course 
the insect is disabled, but the muscles of the sting 
continue to act for a little time, and the longer 
this is permitted, the greater is the inconvenience 
resulting. And the author just quoted suggests, 
that in our attempts to extract a sting thus left, 
the pressure on the poison-bag, may force out a 
greater quantity, and thus increase the evil. Some¬ 
times a bee, when provoked, does not know where 
to make an attack, and a drop of poison may be 
seen clinging to the extremity of its sting. 
The sting is used in self-defence to repel an in¬ 
jury received or feared. The workers sometimes 
employ it in destroying the drones. The queen 
uses her’s only in an attack upon her rivals. The 
bees are greatly excited by the odor of 
their own poison, and are offended also by the hu¬ 
man breath, and by disagreeable odors generally. 
This may account for their antipathy at times to 
persons after a fit of sickness, that previously had 
handled them with impunity. 
The remedies for one who has been stung are 
almost as numerous as for a common cold. We 
have never found anything uniformly successful; 
and when we have neglected all remedies, we 
have sometimes suffered no inconvenience at all. 
Rubbing or sucking the wound, is probably worse 
than useless. The immediate extraction of the 
sting and the copious application of cold water, 
are simple and unobjectionable measures. And for 
the encouragement of apiarians, we will add that 
there is some reason to hope that the human sys¬ 
tem after a time may become so fully impregnated 
with the poison as to suffer no further inconveni¬ 
ence from being stung. 
CURIOUS INSTANCES OF BEES AT WAR AND IN WAR. 
The wars of bees with each other are among 
the strange mysteries of natuie. A few years 
ago, in Conneaut, Ohio, no less than seventy 
swarms, it is said, engaged in a battle which was 
continued from three o’clock in the afternoon un. 
til six. They were all the property of one man 
who had them about equally divided on opposite 
sides of his house. No one could account 
for this desperate contest, and though the ground 
was covered with the slain, neither party gained 
the victory. Two young swarms were entirely 
destroyed, and others were greatly weakened. 
In Carlisle, (England) a swarm of bees flying 
over a garden in which a new colony had been re¬ 
cently placed, settled upon the hive, and a contest 
ensued which resulted in the defeat of one party 
while the victors settled down in the branch of a 
neighboring tree. In this case the cause of the 
battle may have been the desire to secure posses¬ 
sion of the quarters occupied by the frst colony. 
The attack of bees upon an arm i is a matter 
not provided for in the ordinary books on tactics. 
But we have recently had in the papers the fol¬ 
lowing account of a regiment put to flight by a 
swarm of bees. 
“ In India, lately, while the army were returning 
from Alumbagh to camp, one of the Lancers was 
tempted to poke his spear into a bee’s nest, when 
the swarm at once turned out and attacked the 
soldiers with such ferocity, that they all turned 
tail and fled, both officers and men, abandoning 
their guns, and they did not stop until they had 
reached the camp, where they were enabled to 
partially protect themselves from their active 
persecutors.” 
Still more remarkable, however, is the use of 
bees as a means of defence against an armed 
force, and we close this number with some curi 
ous matters of history drawn from sources not 
generally accessible to our readers. 
“A small privateer with forty or fifty men, 
having on board some hives of earthenware full 
of bees, was pursued by a Turkish galley, man¬ 
ned by five hundred seamen soldiers. As soon 
as the latter came alongside, the crew of the pri¬ 
vateer mounted the rigging wiih their hives and 
hurled them down on the deck of the galley. The 
Turks, astonished at this novel mode of warfare, 
and unable to defend themselves from the stings of 
the enraged bees, became so terrified that they 
thought of nothing but to escape their fury ; while 
the crew of the small vessel, defended by masks 
and gloves, flew upon their enemies, sword in 
hand, and captured the vessel almost without re¬ 
sistance.” 
“When Amurath, the Turkish Emperor, during 
the siege of Alba Grajca, had battered down part 
of the wall and was about to take the town by 
assault, he fouud the breach defended by 
bees, many hives of which the inhabitants had 
stationed on the ruins. The Janissaries, alihough 
the bravest soldiers in the Ottoman empire, durst 
not encounter this formidable line of defence, and 
refused to advance.” (Jardine.) 
Kirby and Spencer quote another incident 
“During the confusion occasioned by a time of 
war in 1525, a mob of peasants assembling in 
Hohnstein, attempted to pillage the house of the 
minister of Elende, who having in vain employed 
all his eloquence to dissuade them from their de¬ 
sign, ordered his domestics to fetch bis bee hives 
and throw them into the middle of this furious motn 
The effect was what might be expected ; they 
were immediately put to flight, happy to escape 
being stung.” 
