Modern beemanship, at least to the wide-awake folk in the craft, brings in gold pieces now where one had much ado to make shillings. But profit cannot always be reckoned in money. The old mysteries and the old were a sort of capital that paid cent per cent if you only humoured them aright. Bee-men, who flourished when there was a young queen upon the throne, wore their ignorance as the parson his silk and lawn. It was something that set them apart and above their neighbours. All that the bees did was put to their credit, just for the trouble of a wise wag of the head and a little timely . The organ-blower worked in full view of the congregation, while the player sat invisibly within, so the blower, after the common trend of earthly affairs, got all the glory for the .
There are no mysteries now in honey-craft. Science has dragooned the fairies out of sight and hearing as a man treads out sparks in the whin. But, though the mysteries have gone, the old music of the hives is still here as sweet as ever. This morning, when the sun was but an hour over the hilltop, I rose from my bed, and, coming down the creaking stair through the silence and half-darkness, threw the heavy old house-door back. At once the level sunshine and the song of bees and birds came pouring in together. There was the loud humming of bees in the leafing honeysuckle of the porch, and the soft low note of the hives beyond. In its plan to-day Warrilow Bee-farm reveals the whole story of its growth from times long gone to the present. All the hives near the cottage are old-fashioned skeps of straw, covered in with three sticks and a hackle. A little way down the slope the ancient bee-boxes begin, eight-sided Stewartons mostly, with the green of decades upon some of them. Beyond these stand the first rack-frame hives that ever came to Warrilow; and thence, stretching away down the sunny hillside in long trim rows, are the modern frame-bar hives, spick and span in their new Joseph’s coats of paint, with the gillyflowers driving golden between them, until they reach the line of sheds—comb and honey-stores, extracting-house, and workshops—marking the distant lane-side.
The Water-carriers
As I stood in the , caught by the mesmeric sheen of the light and the beauty of the morning, the humming of the bees overhead grew louder and louder. There were no flowers as yet to attract them, but in early April the of honeysuckle here is always with bees, directly the sun has warmed the clinging dewdrops. These were the water-carriers from the hives. Water at this time is one of the main necessities of bee-life. With it the workers are able to reduce the thick honey and the dry to the right for consumption, and can then generate the bee-milk with which the young larvæ are fed. Later on in the day the water-fetchers will crowd in hundreds to the pond-side down in the valley—every bee-garden has its ancestral drinking-place invariably resorted to year after year. But thus early the pond-water is too cold for safe transport by so a mortal as the little worker-bee; so Nature warms a temporary supply for her here where the dew trembles like drops of molten rainbow at the tip of each woodbine leaf.
I drank myself a deep from the well that goes down a sheer sixty feet into the chalk of the hillside, and fell to loitering through the garden ways. Though it was so early, the little oil-engine down below in the hive-making shed was already coughing through its vent-pipe, and the saw thrumming. Here and there among the hives my men stooped at their work. The was harnessing to the cart, and would soon be the three-mile-long road to the station with the day’s deliveries of honey. By all laws of duty I should be down there, taking my row of hives with the rest—master and men side by side like a string of turnip-hoers—busy at the spring examination which, as all bee-men know, is the most important work of the year. But the very thought of opening hives, now in the first warm break of April weather or at any time, filled me with a strange
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CHAPTER XXVII THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN
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CHAPTER XXIX THE BEE-MILK MYSTERY
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