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Bee-Culture at Present: California
The New World, covered with bloom, its wild flowers untouched by the plough, and free from the depredations of the insects that are a concomitant of civilization, afforded an ideal home for the bees, and it is a pleasure to turn from time-devastated Hymettus to the fresh bee-pastures of our own California, and listen to the delightful bee-talk of John Muir, whose book, "The Mountains of California," none can afford to miss reading.
He says: - "When California was wild, it was one sweet bee-garden throughout its entire length, north and south, and all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the ocean. "Wherever a bee might fly within the bounds of this virgin wilderness, - through the redwood forests, along the banks of the rivers, along the bluffs and headlands fronting the sea, over valley and plain, park and grove, and deep, leafy glen, or far up the piny slopes of the mountains, throughout every belt and section of climate up to the timber line, - bee flowers bloomed in lavish abundance. Here they grew more or less apart in special sheets and patches of no great size, there in broad, flowering folds hundreds of miles in length, - zones of polleny forests, zones of flowery chaparral, stream-tangles of rubus and wild rose, sheets of golden compositæ, beds of violets, beds of mint, beds of bryanthus and clover, and so on, certain species blooming somewhere all the year round."
Again, he is speaking of the bottom-lands along the rivers : - "When I first saw this central garden, the most extensive and regular of all the bee-pastures of the State, it seemed all one sheet of plant gold, hazy and vanishing in the distance, distinct as a new map along the foot-hills at my feet. "The air was sweet with fragrance, the larks sang their blessed songs, rising on the wing as I advanced, then sinking out of sight in the polleny sod, while myriads of wild bees stirred the lower air with their monotonous hum, monotonous, yet forever fresh and sweet as every-day sunshine."
The hive-bee, not indigenous in this country, was brought Bee-Culture at Present by settlers from Europe to America sometime in the seventeenth century, it is supposed, though the exact date is not known. It is stated by some that the first were taken, certainly with great propriety, by the Spaniards to Florida, the land of flowers.
They are there to-day, some in large and scientifically conducted apiaries, some in old-fashioned box hives in remote hammocks, adding to the meagre stores of their native owners, who live in a cabin near them.
In the "Bee Journal" for July, 1886, we read: - "When John Eliot translated the Scriptures into the language of the aborigines of North America, no words were found expressive of the terms 'wax' and 'honey.'" The first form of Apis Mellifica brought to this country was the common "brown" or German bee, and it is this variety which is still commonly kept in remote country places, and this which at first filled the land with innumerable swarms of "wild bees." Until recently it was the only hive-bee we had, and it is of this bee and the white clover, which also came to North America with the European settler, that Hiawatha sings, describing the coming of the conqueror : - " Wheresoe'er they move, before them Swarms the stinging fly, the Ahmo, Swarms the bee, the honey-maker; Wheresoe'er they tread, beneath them Springs a flower unknown among us, Springs the White Man's Foot in blossom."