Title: American bee journal
Identifier: americanbeejourn5859hami (find matches)
Year: 1861 (1860s)
Authors:
Subjects: Bee culture; Bees
Publisher: (Hamilton, Ill. , etc. , Dadant & Sons)
Contributing Library: UMass Amherst Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: UMass Amherst Libraries

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1919 AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 195 arates them virtually from their Holy Land sisters. The bright golden crescent of the Cyprians becomes darker, though still visible, and the orange color of the insect changes into pale citron: tlic workers are a trifle smaller. Xo change as to liveliness of character worth mentioning. The Syrian drones are bright-colored, with brown spots. Syrian workers fly out early and come home late, and if given the oc- casion, can gather as much honey as Cyprians or Holy Lands. Beyrout, where I had an apiary for several seasons, is not much of a bee pastur- age, as the houses and villas are usu- ally surrounded by mulberry trees, for the silk worms, excluding honey- plants, except the cactus hedges (Opuntia) which blossom in May. The queens are as prolific as Holy Land queens, moreover, they lay just a few hundred drones less than their Holy Land sisters and, but for a slight difference in color, do not, as a rule, vary. The best stock can be had between Tripoli, Syria, and Bey- rout, along the narrow strip of plain or undulated low lands between the abrupt chains of Lebanon and the sea. I am inclined to think that Syrians are not so excitable as their north- ern neighbors, because bee pests abound much more in the south, where nature has bestowed more re- sources to the breeding of the hor- nets and wasps, by way of fruit trees, and to the multiplication of the stel- lion, a thorny lizard, sometimes fat- tening on bees. The stellion is a known feature of the Orient, dark grey in color. He is met with all over the grey rocks in this land of grey- ness. Living on small insects, he may be quite blessing where grass- hoppers and flies of all kinds abound, but what a nuisance to apiaries! He has the advantage of having a gelat- inous substance around his formid- able jaws, in which the bees leave their stings before being swallowed. A captured stellion one day showed us over a dozen bee-stings on his gums and did not seem at all trou- bled by the poison. We had an apiary out in the plains of Philistia, near Ekron, famous for the "god of flies" (Baal-Zebub) in ancient times. Stellions were so numerous that we had to dig trenches around the hives to protect them, yet in our absence the trenches were forded and the bees decimated. \Ye carried them to a neighboring house for protection and put wire cloth on the windows, but hornets also assailed the bees. The isolated house was between Gaza and Jaffa, and in our absence an earth- quake buried bees, furniture and house in the rubbish, so hornets and stellions could no longer linger about for them, and, as in olden days, "the land had rest for many months." Holy Land workers are slightly smaller than Syrians, and fuzz also is more abundant, and decidedly grey in color. Holy Land queens are hardly to be distinguished from Syrians; some mothers are very small, others larger than Syrians; in color, too, as a rule, they are slightly lighter col- ored. The Holy Land bees are now found all over Palestine and the in- habited parts of the Trans-Jordan country; in the north, to the sources of the Jordan ; in the south to Gaza, where the Sinaitic Desert cuts them short; in the west to the Mediterran- ean, and to the east the Sj'rian and North Arabian deserts oppose their sands to the continuation of bee cul- ture. Beekeeping still flourishes in the plains with greater success than in the sterile mountains of Judah. Big apiaries, containing hundreds of clay cylinder hives are met with in most villages of the plains, whilst the tra- ditional apiaries about Jerusalem and Bethlehem, seen by occasional trav- elers, are rather apologies of apiaries to compare with the lowland stock. Bee pasturage is very abundant along the Maritime plains, from February to July or August. Through the long rainless summers, which greatly hin- der the secretion of nectar in orange blossoms, cactus, thyme and lavender, moisture from the dews, which fall heavily in western Palestine, revives the nectaries. Holy Land queens, as already stated, differ very slightly from the others, though occasionally a beauti- ful colored orange insect is met with. As a rule, when left to their instincts, they rear about one-fourth of drones. As soon as the colony has reached its full development they are as prolific as the other yellow bees, and more especially, a full colony will raise hundreds of good queen-cells; this is a specialty of Holy Lands. A noted beekeeper visited me one day in Jaffa, when I was in bed with the fever. I jumped up when he told me his name—P. C. Schachinger, of the Bienenzeitung, in Budapest. I showed him a hive bearing his name, and as we hunted the colony for the mother we counted 385 queen-cells, yet the stock did not swarm. To explain, thev would have swarmed if 1 had left them alone for any length of time, but I usually made artificial swarms when the colonies had over twenty frames of brood. Sometimes I waited until they had twenty-four, but that only happened in April, dur- ing the orange honey flow. The greyish yellow workers are as lively as their yellow sisters, perhaps a little more so, because of the huge hornets which nestle in the sandy plains around fruit-growing locali- ties. When the hornets can find neither bees nor fruit, they feed on carrion, which, in the olden days, was found along the roadsides lead- ing to towns and villages. The bees in the skull of Onesilius reported by Herodotus, the hornets feeding on carrion and cleaning the skeleton in a few days, the foxes and jackals helping them in their work; the ig- norance of beekeeping in biblical days, witness the story of Samson and his swarm in a skeleton, point to the confusion of bees with hornets found in scripture. The honeybee was brought to Palestine either from Egypt or Assyria, or from both, for as late as King Ahaz, of Judah, more than four centuries after the Sam- sonian epoch, Isaiah says: "And it shall come to pass in that day. that the Lord shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost parts of the riv- ers of Egypt, and for the bee, that is in the land of Assyria, and they shall come and shall rest all of them in the desolate valleys, in the holes of the rocks and upon all thorns, and upon all bushes." (Isaiah vii. 18-19.) The Hebrews only knew Deborah, the bee or hornet, whilst the Arabs call bees Nahel, and the hornets Da- bour. Now the word "Nahel" derived from the verb "nah," to sigh, to mourn, is of Egyptian importation. In the hieroglyphics, the bee is rep- resented as the sigher, the mourner for the departed, on account of the sighing sound which is heard at the hive entrance. The bees have thus taken the road
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