The Vellum Bee Book of Watnall Hall

A peculiar old book from Watnall Hall's library gives us a clue about one of Sir Lancelot Rolleston's more unusual hobbies, bee-keeping, and about a remarkable building that once stood in the hall gardens, his bee house. The book is so old its leathery pages are made from vellum. It is an original 1623 copy of "The Feminine Monarchie or The History of Bees by Schoolmaster Charles Butler" 

The Watnall Hall book was sold at the 1954 auction for an undisclosed fee. In 2021 a second edition of this book sold for £4800. The Butler bee book is particularly important, being "...the greatest early British bee book and contains the best account of skep beekeeping which is available today" (British Bee Books). It is the first edition to contain both the woodcut frontispiece and the remarkable 4-part madrigal which was an attempt to capture the piping sound of the queen at swarming time.. 

Above - The queen bee madrigal
Below - a recording of a queen bee piping

Like many educated Victorian men, Sir Lancelot adopted a particular line of amateur scientific enquiry. His interest was in bee-keeping and he had a remarkable "bee house" built in the grounds of Watnall Hall inside which he could sit and watch the bees through glass surrounded by the soothing sound of the bees' workaday buzzing. 

The bee house is described in Leonard Jack's 1881 book Great Houses of Nottinghamshire as... 

"its thatched bee-house, full of murmurous sound. Of that bee-house I made a closer inspection. It was designed by Mr. Rolleston, who takes considerable interest in bee culture, and is large enough inside for a study. As a matter of fact, Mr. Rolleston occasionally shares this house with the bees. The boxes in which the insects deposit their honey are so arranged that they cannot fly about in the interior of the apartment, whilst their operations can be watched and studied through glass. So the bee-house serves a double purpose, besides being an ornament to the garden. Whilst the bees are making their honey, and arranging their domestic matters in the glass cases, Mr. Rolleston is writing his letters at a table, and the apartment is filled with a soothing sound."

To provide his bees with winter foraging, he had a field "the size of a cricket pitch" planted with Nottingham blue crocuses opposite Hall Farm on Narrow Lane. 

Why Do Bees Like Crocus Flowers? Careful selection of the crocus varieties enables you to provide food for your bees from autumn through to late winter or early spring. As well as nectar, crocuses provide hungry bees with plenty of pollen. Honey bees certainly visit crocus flowers. Those that flower in late winter to early spring will provided much needed sustenance to foraging worker honey bees, keen to replenish the colony food stores following the cool winter months. It's worth remembering that honey bees will brave very cool temperatures in order to find food for the colony.

Nottingham from The Meadows at Crocus time, 1890 by Thomas William Hammond

It's a hobby Sir Lancelot seems to have kept up for many years... 

Nottingham Journal - Monday 01 July 1929 - BEEKEEPERS AT WATNALL Members and friends of the Notts. Beekeepers' Association, by kind permission Sir Lancelot Rolleston, spent a delightful afternoon in the grounds at Watnall Hall on Saturday on a tour of the grounds. The visitors saw the bee house, which is the only one of its kind in the county, also the Mill hive, which is one of the earliest forms of box hives and is in a wonderful state of preservation. An interesting address was given by the Rev. E F Hemmins. president of the Huntingdonshire B.K.A., on keeping from ancient times until now.

The importance of talking to the bees

There is a very strange story connected with the bees and the bee-house, told by Mr. Peart, the last gardener at the Hall. He joined the staff after WW2 ended in 1945, so he never knew Colonel Rolleston at all. He was told of an event by Mr. Justice the chauffeur who looked after the bees following the death of the Colonel in 1941. It goes like this. "He said that when the colonel died, Lady Maud said to him, "Now look, Justice", (you never got called Mr. Justice - just Justice or whatever) "you're to go around each hive, give them a tap and say your Master's dead ', “and he said 'I felt as daft as a brush, but I did it'. 

This is the tradition of "telling the bees" and it is well known amongst bee keepers. It was said that not doing this would encourage the bees to desert the hive or the colony to stop producing honey or even die. 

A young bee-keeper "Telling the bees"

In 1949, Lady Maud died, and Mr. Justice had retired, so Mr. Peart was in charge of the hives, but “I didn't go and tap round them - no way - but there was a man in the village, a Mr. Bill Swells, and he were a big bee man so I said, "You can have those bees Bill, I don't want anything more to do with them. They're more trouble to me than they're worth, so get them out". But when he came up- you can believe it or believe it not- there was no sign of any disease, no mice, no moths, no reason, but those bees were dead - and they'd got plenty of food, but they'd gone. He got one hive that's all. The rest had died. Coincidence or whatever, but it's strange isn't it, but that happened."

After the bees died, Mr. Peart removed the roof from the bee-house, placed hot pipes from the saddle room inside, and turned the structure into a greenhouse. One feels that he didn't like bees as "them bees’d go for me and I'd react to it.” 

There are many stories in the village about the trouble they caused when swarming in the wrong place. They nearly always seemed to swarm on to the high yew hedge round the old cock-fighting pit, but they also ended up in the rose pergola and once even interrupted one of Lady Maud's famous Sunday School lessons taking place on the lawn as it was a hot day. What Lady Maud said on that occasion is not recorded!

For a more modern take on the bee house here's my son's glass-topped Minecraft version! Nice to see the younger generations learning about it, bee-keeping is very important in Minecraft ...

For further reading about the bees of Watnall Hall and many other stories, please follow this link to the main "Tales from Watnall Hall" blog... 

Sources - Watnall Hall and the Rolleston Family RA Horton 2000; 1954 Watnall Hall auction catalogue.

Background and notes

Piping - Trumpeting The Queen Bee

Posted on November 10, 2014 in Misc, The Bee, Travels

3 Comments

I recently had the pleasure of meeting two fascinating bee experts, Debra Roberts and Filiz Telek. The three of us dined at an unassuming, but superb, little restaurant in Istanbul’s Galata district and, as you might expect, we discussed bees.

Resturant

The Galata restaurant where we dined. © Andrew Gough

We took turns enthusiastically sharing our stories, and over dessert Debra, who teaches beekeeping, recounted the first time she experienced queen-bee piping, or the name given to the extraordinary noise made by the queen bee during its birth and introduction into the hive.

Debra

 Debra preparing to smoke the beehive

I was enthralled, but had to confess that I was only vaguely familiar with the phenomenon. Debra asked me to look into it, for she felt it must have been important to ancient cultures, and was hoping to trace its influence. Later that night she emailed to me an audio recording of the queen-bee piping, and I listened to it intently. I became more mesmerised by the haunting sound with each and every play.

Debra’s recording of the queen bee piping:

I knew that ancient cultures were aware of at least some of the bee’s idiosyncratic traits. For instance, the Greek philosopher, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), had written about the bee’s waggle dance, and my research suggested that he was not the first to notice, or be influenced by, this ancient form of satellite navigation. But was there evidence that the ancients knew about queen-bee piping and, if so, did they incorporate the unique sound into their customs and rituals in any demonstrable way?

As I listened to the recording with my headphones, I at first thought the queen-bee piping sounded like bagpipes, or other ancient wind instruments, even the didgeridoo. Upon further contemplation, it also reminded me of a trumpet; an instrument, serendipitously enough, that has a long history of being used in ceremonies where ‘royalty’ is introduced, much like when the queen bee introduces herself to the hive and affirms her supremacy with that astonishing sound. I was intrigued.

I spent the next few hours poring through my beekeeping library, and other sources, and although I could not find direct evidence that the ancients mimicked or otherwise paid homage to the sound of the queen bee’s piping, I was surprised at how many ancient musical instruments had been crafted to replicate the sounds of nature – animal noises in particular.

I also came across the musical genre known as ‘drone’, a minimalist style characterised by the use of sustained notes – just like the buzzing sound of a bee. Before becoming popular with experimental artists like the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno and an assortment of German bands (such as Can and Kraftwerk), drone music was accompanied by Byzantine chants, or what is known as drone-singing. Curiously, many musical scholars believe that drone-singing was an attempt to imitate the bagpipe; an instrument that contrary to popular belief, did not originate in Scotland. In fact, a sculpture of bagpipes, over 3,000 years old, has been identified on a Hittite slab at Euyuk in the Middle East, and bagpipes were known about and practised by numerous ancient cultures, including the Egyptians.

Turkey Piping

I came across a variant of ancient instruments, including bagpipes, on a recent trip to Hierapolis, an ancient city situated on hot springs in Phrygia, south-western Anatolia. © Andrew Gough

The fact that ancient Egyptians practised a reeded form of the bagpipe that was later adopted by Rome is interesting, for the Egyptian King was known as the ‘Beekeeper’, held the title ‘He of the Sedge and the Bee’, and featured an image of a bee in his cartouche. Esteemed positions in the Royal Court of the Old and Middle Kingdoms held the title of the ‘Sealer of the Honey’ and ‘Overseer of the Beekeepers’, reflective of the importance of bees, and their by-products, in Egyptian culture. Even the ancient Goddess, Neith, lived in the ‘House of the Bee’, and the equally ancient God, Osiris, was buried in the ‘Mansion of the Bee’, both in Sais, the former delta capital, whose pillar inscriptions spawned the legend of Atlantis.

Additionally, many Egyptian royals included images of beekeeping on the walls of their tombs, such as the Theban Tomb (TT100) of Rekhmire, a noble of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who held the title of High Priest of Heliopolis, Vizier and Prince during the reigns of Thutmosis III and Amenhotep II. There is also the Theban Tomb of Pabasa (TT279), Chief Steward to Nitocris I, Divine Adoratrice of Amun, of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. However, the most ancient, and perhaps the most notable, is Nyuserre Ini, the sixth King of the Fifth Dynasty, whose Sun Temple and pyramid at Abu Gurab, in Saqqara, illustrates the art of Egyptian beekeeping, fully formed, around 2400 BCE.

Andy at Sun Temple

 Author at the Abu Gurab Sun Temple, on the spot where the relief depicting beekeeping was located before a recent earthquake collapsed it. © Andrew Gough

abeille-miel-peinture-egypte-ne-user-re-abou-ghorab

 A sketch of the beekeeping relief from the Abu Gurab Sun Temple, 2400 BCE

However, the ancient Egyptians also revered the trumpet and two allegedly magical trumpets, one silver and one bronze, were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. Not only do they remain the oldest operative trumpets in the world, they are believed to incite war when played. So, did the bee-loving Egyptians embrace the bagpipe or trumpet, because it reminded them of the queen-bee piping? As much as I would like to believe this was so, I simply could not say.

Tut tuttrumpet

 Tutankhamun’s trumpets

I was also reminded that the sound of bees humming – not a buzzing sound per se, but the explicit sounds of bees – has been recounted by individuals during yoga, near death experiences, apparitions, and even alien-abduction experiences. In Indian mythology the sound of a bee humming was emulated in Vedic chants. Certainly, the sound of the bee seemed significant, but the question remained, what about the sound of the queen-bee piping?

It was approaching 2am, but I carried on and soon dug up a curious reference to bees and piping in the Old Testament:

Isaiah 7:18:  “And it will be in that day that the Lord will make a piping sound for the fly which is in the end of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee which is in the land of Assyria.”

Academia’s explanation for the seemingly perplexing statement is that the fly and the bee refer to the armies of Egypt and Assyria, respectively. While this elucidation is possible, I remained unconvinced, and have my own theories, although they remain a work in progress. Still, for now, I could offer no better explanation, other than to say, it’s an interesting turn of phrase, and I am going to continue to give it some thought.

At first glance I had been unable to confirm Debra’s suspicion that the sound of the queen-bee piping was revered by the ancients, but my investigation has only just begun. And with this sort of thing awareness is the first step towards enlightenment. Time will tell what the bees want me to know.

3 Comments

terence hogan 10 years ago Reply

I had to laugh at your ‘sum of three plus three’, as 6 is one of the keys to the ancient measuring systems I have been investigating.

Anyway, re Queen Bee ‘piping’

Happened to be reading an article on bees by a beekeeper of some thirty years standing who has developed a very ‘green/natural’ way of keeping bees healthy and productive. One part of which is being aware of earth frequencies. Specifically that they like frequencies of around 190 Hz

and that when they swarm they create a frequency of 250 Hz.

I used a sound analyser on your embedded track of the queen bee piping and the bottom end is 250 Hz.

Just another bit of information to file away! Never know when it might bee! useful.

Cheers

Terry

Florica Stone 9 years ago Reply

I have listen to the hive tonight .

it only made half the sound you shared .

David Gould 7 years ago Reply

Virgil mentions queen bee piping in the fourth Georgic, and compares it to the sound of a trumpet or bugle. Georgics 4.71-2.