Honeyeater

“ A piece of meat hung on a tree, high enough to make him jump to reach it, and a short spear, with its handle firmly planted in the ground beneath, are used as a device to induce the hyena to commit suicide by impalement.
The honey-guide is an extraordinary bird; how is it that every member of its family has learned that all men, white or black, are fond of honey? The instant the little fellow gets a glimpse of a man, he hastens to greet him with the hearty invitation to come, as Mbia translated it, to a bees’ hive, and take some honey. ”

“ The Helmeted Honey-eater is very rare, and is probably confined to the deep forests of Gippsland. It is one of the most splendid of Honey-eaters.
That active city-dweller, the Greenie, is found in almost every large eucalypt that happens to be in flower. It is pugnacious. As it busily brushes honey from the flowers, or catches an insect on the wing, the white ear plume can be seen. Otherwise, it has not conspicuous colors. Its lively call of "chick-oo-wee" adds something to life for the busy city toiler.
Now come the Miners. The Noisy Miner is known to nearly everyone. ”

“ We read:—"Honey-eaters vary much in colour, but the males and females do not, as a rule, vary much in markings, but by far the larger majority of hen birds have greenish or dull-coloured backs. Their nests are mostly hanging, and built in varying situations, according to the colour of the bird, and you can generally make a good guess at the shade of the owner's back by the place it builds its nest in: if among green leaves at the end of a branch, the bird will probably be greenish, as, for instance, Ptilotis pencillata (White-plumed Honey-eater) ”

“ The long steady flow of honey had caused the bees to tolerate them until late, but now their time had come. At every hive-entrance the bees could be seen chasing them, biting and worrying them, driving them out, but seldom stinging. The big, stingless drone is very much afraid of his armed little sisters, and is unable to resist when thrown out of the hive. All day long could be heard the loud buzzing of the drones as they tried in vain to reenter their homes, and the next morning they could be seen by scores, dead in front of the hives, where they had perished of cold and starvation. ”

“ Swarms are robbed of their honey on the appearance of the wild fig. They produce the best larvae at the time the honey is a-making. The bee carries wax and bees bread round its legs, but vomits the honey into the cell. After depositing its young, it broods over it like a bird. The grub when it is small lies slantwise in the comb, but by and by rises up straight by an effort of its own and takes food, and holds on so tightly to the honeycomb as actually to cling to it.
The young of bees and of drones is white, and from the young come the grubs; and the grubs grow into bees and drones. ”

“ Having caught one of the honey bees, which in size exceeds very little the common house fly, the native sticks a piece of feather or white down to it with gum, and then letting it go, sets off after it as fast as he can: keeping his eye steadily fixed upon the insect, he rushes along like a madman, tumbling over trees and bushes that lie in his way, but rarely losing sight of his object, until conducted to its well-filled store, he is amply paid for all his trouble. The honey is not so firm as that of the English bee, but is of very fine flavour and quality. ”

“ The sunbird, as the honeysucker is frequently called, is provided with a curved beak and a long tubular tongue to enable it the better to rob cup-like blossoms of their honey. The bird must perforce be very small and light, or it would find it impossible to reach the nectar of many flowers. As a matter of fact, it is almost as light as air, so is able to support itself on one flower when drinking honey from another. Sometimes, if no perch be available, the little honeysucker will hover in the air on rapidly vibrating wings and thus extract the sweets from a flower. ”

“ In such times of scarcity, the bee-keeper should always be on the alert, and begin feeding only in sufficient quantity to produce activity in the hive. It frequently occurs that bees use up all the unsealed honey in the hive, and almost stop brooding. They appear to be reluctant to open their sealed honey. It seems that there is a principle at this point which we have not been able to grasp yet. I think that as a rule, if bees run out of unsealed honey in the spring months, the keeper should, from time to time, shave off the capping of some of the full cells. ”

“ Food habits.—The honey-eater feeds partly on insect life and partly on nectar and juices from flowers. At Guam, the honey-eater was frequently found at flowers of the ink berry bush, where evidently both nectar and insects were obtained. The birds were attracted also to the coconut palms, especially when the reproductive parts of the palms were developing.
Remarks.—The Cardinal Honey-eater is one of the most conspicuous land birds in the Mariana Islands. Its scarlet plumage and characteristic fluttering flight cause it to stand out against its habitat of forest, scrub, and garden. ”

“ When they had laden themselves with honey, they would rise into the air, and dart off in a straight line, almost with the velocity of a bullet. The hunters watched attentively the course they took, and then set off in the same direction, stumbling along over twisted roots and fallen trees, with their eyes turned up to the sky. In this way they traced the honey-laden bees to their hive, in the hollow trunk of a blasted oak, where, after buzzing about for a moment, they entered a hole about sixty feet from the ground. ”

“ It will be better to wait till the next morning, when evaporation and the coolness of the night will have thickened the liquid sufficiently for it to remain in the cells during the manipulation. The combs, also, will have become firmer, and less liable to fall, with the diminished temperature.
The operation of driving from skeps is abundantly practised by apiarians, in the autumn, among the hives of those cottagers who would otherwise follow the old and most barbarous plan of killing their bees to take the honey. ”

“ Mice occasionally effect an entrance, especially into skeps, and annoy the inhabitants by their disagreeable odour, and by gnawing the combs, and eating brood and honey. The winter is the time when there is most danger from these plunderers, as the bees are then too torpid with the cold to notice and to attack the intruders. It is easy to prohibit their inroads, by sufficiently contracting the entrances, and preventing their gnawing the rims of the hives, or getting under the top coverings. ”

“ In the woods, the hunter must stop, every little while, to test his "line." Sometimes he is baffled, because the bees do not know the woods from the ground side. Bees hunt for honey far from home. Usually it is easier to find a tree half a mile away than from only a few yards. Since bees like water, a careful hunter looks along creeks and near springs. Wild honey is better than tame because it tastes of the adventure of finding it. Second Outline of "An Idyl of the Honey-Bee" The presence of a colony of bees in a wood gives it interest. ”

“ These various manipulations, above all the compression of the throat, lead to the desired result: the honey in the stomach of the bee ascends to the mouth. I see the drops of honey welling out, lapped up by the glutton as soon as they appear. The bandit greedily takes in its mouth the extended and sugared tongue of the dead insect; then once more it presses the neck and the thorax, and once more applies the pressure of its abdomen to the honey-sac of the bee. The honey oozes forth and is instantly licked up. ”

“ In the cells, or little holes in the wax honeycomb, are many eggs that after a while will hatch out into other bees, mostly workers or drones. The queen bee lays the eggs that hatch into other bees. But if it should happen that the queen should die, the worker bees at once begin to feed to some of the half-hatched little bees a peculiar kind of food gathered from the flowers. It is a sort of mixture of honey and juices from the bees’ bodies. ”

“ The queen must have perished in the winter. These bees were all old ones from the last season, and they had no possibility of rearing any young. In a little while longer they would all have died, and they were well aware of their desperate state. They were intensely nervous and fierce-tempered, yet their indomitable instinct for work had led them to keep gathering honey. As they had no brood to feed it to, and adult bees eat little, they had accumulated almost two combs full of fresh honey from the willows and maples. ”

“ It waits there for the follower to open the hive and usually until the person has departed with his loot of honeycomb, when it comes down to the plundered bee’s nest and begins to feed on the bits of comb left strewn about. The time during which the bird may wait quietly may vary from a few minutes to well over an hour and a half.”
African natives regard the bird as an almost infallible guide to honey. They try to attract it by grunting like a ratel or chopping on trees to imitate the sound of opening a nest. ”

“ Their colony consists of an egg-laying queen, drones to fertilize the queen, and workers to gather food and care for the young. Honey bees can release “alarm odors” associated with the sting gland, which cause other bees in the vicinity of an odor-marked victim to attack and inflict multiple stings. Unlike other hymenopterous insects, the honey bee worker has a barbed stinger and can sting only once; to escape, the bee must leave its entire stinging apparatus attached to the skin of its victim. As important pollinators of crops, honey bees are very beneficial to man. ”

“ A large store of honey is indispensable to support a large stock of bees during the winter; and the security of the hive is known mainly to depend on a large number of bees being supported. Hence the saving of wax by largely saving honey, and the time consumed in collecting the honey, must be an important element of success any family of bees. Of course the success of the species may be dependent on the number of its enemies, or parasites, or on quite distinct causes, and so be altogether independent of the quantity of honey which the bees can collect. ”

“ In a hole in the tree trunk, or in the ground nearby the bees' nest is to be found.
When the beehive is opened, and the honey taken, the honey-guide will eat the comb that is left, and apparently it is for this that the complicated behavior of leading of man to the beehive is developed.
Wax of the honeycomb is a usual food of this species, judging by stomach examinations, and one wonders how they get it when man is not about to open the bee trees for them. The birds have no special adaptation for getting into the hives ”

“ Some winters are so long and so rigid, that our valuable insects suffer greatly from the intensity of the cold; and the least evil it does them, is to crystallise their honey, which is then no longer of any use to them. The warmth keeps it in a fluid state; but this warmth, concentrated in the middle, or on one side of the hive, does not prevent it being candied in the other parts of it. More candied honey will generally be found on one side than the other. ”

“ When the honey-bird has shown one tree, if the hunters are satisfied with that, and refuse to follow him further, he leaves them; but I have never heard of an instance in which the bird misled any one in regard to finding honey. It frequently happens, however, that a honey-bird will lead a person into very dangerous places, and unless the hunter keeps his eyes about him when following this bird, he may run right into a lion, a venomous snake, or some other equally undesirable acquaintance.”
—A correspondent of a New Orleans paper writes: “Dick was only a big toad. ”

“ Where honey is present it is secreted on the inside of the base of the stamens and accumulated in the base of the tube formed by the united filaments round the ovary. It is accessible only to insects with long probosces, such as bees. In these cases the posterior stamen is free, allowing access to the honey. The flowers stand more or less horizontally; the large erect white or coloured standard renders them conspicuous, the wings form a platform on which the insect rests and the keel encloses the stamens and pistil, protecting them from rain and the attacks of unbidden pollen-eating insects. ”

“ It did not last long, though, for they were tired and stiff with bending over the supers; they were gummy with propolis and wax, and sticky with honey, and on the window was a cluster of bees the size of a small swarm, which had been carried in with the honey. After dark Carl brushed them off into a bucket, carried them out, and poured them down in front of a weak hive. They crawled gladly in, and as they all had their sacs full of honey, they were admitted. A honey-laden bee is always welcome to any hive. ”

“ That honey is fatal to larvæ is a fact pregnant with consequences. Various predatory insects feed their young with honey-makers. Such, to my knowledge, are the Philanthus coronatus, Fabr., which stores its burrows with the large Halictus; the Philanthus raptor, Lep., which chases all the smaller Halictus indifferently, being itself a small insect; the Cerceris ornata, Fabr., which also kills Halictus; and the Polaris flavipes, Fabr., which by a strange eclecticism fills its cells with specimens of most of the Hymenoptera which are not beyond its powers. ”