JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found this report in an issue of the American Agriculturalist (1865), waiting quietly to be arranged and re-arrange, but hopefully not mis-arranged.  In any event, the title was quite outre (“Burying Bees”) and so was the caption of the article’s illustration (“Buried Stock of Bees”) which stopped me for various out-of-context reasons, all before I found the dry-but-lyrical descriptive text.  So I lifted a bit of that directly, and poemized it in placement only. The result:

Bees may be buried when flowers are gone,

and left until they come again.

Weak stocks may be wintered,

but they are usually more trouble than they are worth,

because they are annoyed and kept weak,

if not robbed by the stronger stocks,

and because they consume proportionally more honey to keep them warm.

While in the ground each bee eats its own allowance.

They are not annoyed by the mice,

nor disturbed by the changes of the weather

but really are at rest; nor is the expense much compared with preparing

and placing bees in a  room, or cellar, or watching out of doors,

following which we buried our stocks last winter.