> The value of a May swarm is referred to by Tusser, who says:
> Take heed to thy bees that are ready to swarm.
> The loss there of now is a crown's worth of harm.
A mere Crown? Five shillings? 1/4 of an English Pound?
Sounds a little low.
The saying nearly everyone knows is this one:
"A swarm in May is worth a load of hay
a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon
but a swarm in July is not worth a fly"
You can look up the current New York spot silver quote yourself, but I grew
600 acres of boutique horse hay every year for the dressage and show horse
crowd in Virginia, so I know a little bit about hay. I've been asked this
exact question more than once, as I both kept bees and made hay while the
sun shined in the first decade of my purported "retirement".
Given the above, several questions arise:
1) How much is a load of hay worth?
2) How much hay is a "load" of hay?
Very much unlike the hay itself, there is not a "Cut and Dried" answer.
But we can guestimate fairly well:
First, forget bales - the saying above was coined before baling machines, so
we are talking loose hay. Loose Alfalfa hay is 4 to 4.5 lbs/cubic foot
and 450-500 cubic feet per ton. Nonlegume loose hay ranges lighter, 3.4 to
4.5 lbs/cubic foot and 450 - 600 cu ft per ton. Some Amish still put up
loose hay, so the numbers are recently measured, accurate "for trade"
volumes and weights, as lots of hay is bought "in the barn" by cattlemen,
where one brings the cattle to the hay, rather than bringing the hay to the
cattle.
A "load" would come in a hay wagon, and there are still museums with good
replicas of hay wagons of the time, roughly 16 ft long, 4 feet high, with a
trapezoidal bed area, 6.5 ft wide at bottom, 10 ft wide at top. So, 528
cubic feet 'tween the boards.
Men could stand upon the hay as long as it was lower than the sides, and
thereby compress the hay as they stacked it, and then they could stack loose
hay on top to a height equal the height of the sides of the wagon, so let's
estimate the amount of hay as equal to 2.5 * 528 cubic feet = 1320 cubic
feet of hay per "load".
So 2.2 to 2.9 tons per load.
These days, buying generic hay of no particular pedigree by the ton at the
co-op costs $250-$300 per ton
So, $550 to $870 per swarm at today's prices for hay.
Somehow, I think that even way back in the 1600s when the phase was coined,
the value was slightly over-estimated.
But a HECK of a lot more than a crown!
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