

Almost every year I reply, early in August, to correspondents who, like the writer from Patterdale, have noticed dead and mutilated bees lying beneath the lime trees. Evelyn speaks of the lime, with “sweet blossoms, the delight of bees,” and in July and early August we have all noticed the happy hum of the bees as they boom round the limes, filling themselves with honey. But the bees, especially the drones of certain bumble-bees, are like many human drinkers; they do not know when to stop, and, soaking all day long, at last become so stupid that they cannot fly; they drop, intoxicated, to the ground beneath. Thus we find them, drunk and incapable, and often with ghastly wounds in their bodies, dead or only able feebly to move a limb.

Ten or a dozen years ago I spent some time watching the limes and examining the bodies of the slain. I failed to see tits actually kill the bees, but Mr Edward Saunders, to whom I submitted some of the bees, assured me that he had seen a bee drop and detected a great tit at work in the tree; the tits, he felt sure, emptied the bodies of the stupefied bees of their honied contents. This I do not doubt, but examination of the bodies and the ground beneath the trees caused me to think that possibly birds were not the only destroyers; the drunken bees were at the mercy of ants or carnivorous beetles, which the nature of the wounds of some of them suggested. The late Fred Enock, a wonderfully keen observer, found that an introduced lime was far more intoxicating than our native species – its honey was more heady, and consequently more bees which sipped its sweets fell victims than those which visited other plants. There is one other point from which we can draw a moral; it is at the present time, when bees are less busy on behalf of the full nests – when there are an abundance of workers to look after stocking the nests with food, – that the death-rate increases; the bees indulge to excess and pay the penalty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manchester Guardian, 7 August 1917.

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