“But it is just here that the art of the bee-keeper comes in. He must prevent this interruption to progress by maintaining the confidence of the bees in the season. He must create an artificial plenty until the real prosperity begins. Yet, after all, he must never lose sight of the main principle, of carrying out the ideas of the bees, not his own. In good beemanship there is only one road to success: you must study to find out what the bees intend to do, and then help them to do it. They call us bee-masters, but bee-servants would be much the better name. The bees have their definite plan of life, perfected through countless ages, and nothing you can do will ever turn them from it. You can delay their work, or you can even thwart it altogether, but no one has ever succeeded in changing a single principle in bee-life. And so the best bee-master is always the one who most exactly obeys the orders from the hive.”
CHAPTER IV
CHLOE AMONG THE BEES
The bee-mistress looked at my card, then put its owner under a like careful scrutiny. In the shady garden where we stood, the sunlight fell in quivering golden splashes round our feet. High overhead, in the purple elm-blossom, the bees and the glad March wind made rival music. Higher still a ripple of lark-song hung in the blue, and a score of rooks were sailing by, filling the morning with their rich, deep clamour of unrest.
The bee-mistress drew off her sting-proof gloves in thoughtful deliberation.
“If I show you the bee-farm,” said she, eyeing me somewhat doubtfully, “and let you see what women have done and are doing in an ideal feminine industry, will you promise to write of us with seriousness? I mean, will you undertake to deal with the matter for what it is—a plain, business enterprise by business people—and not treat it flippantly, just because no masculine creature has had a hand in it?”
“This is an attempt,” she went on—the needful assurances having been given—“an attempt, and, we believe, a real solution to a very real difficulty. There are thousands of educated women in the towns who have to earn their own bread; and they do it usually by trying to compete with men in walks of life for which they are wholly unsuited. Now, why do they not come out into the pure air and quiet of the countryside, and take up any one of several pursuits open there to a refined, well-bred woman? Everywhere the labourers are forsaking the land and crowding into the cities. That is a farmers’ problem, with which, of course, women have nothing to do. The rough, heavy work in the cornfields must always be done either by men or machinery. But there are certain employments, even in the country, that women can invariably undertake better than men, and bee-keeping is one of them. The work is light. It needs just that delicacy and deftness of touch that only a woman can bring to it. It is profitable. Above all, there is nothing about it, from first to last, of an objectionable character, demanding masculine interference. In poultry-farming, good as it is for women, there must always be a stony-hearted man about the place to do unnameable necessary things in a fluffy back-shed. But bee-keeping is clean, clever, humanising, open-air work—essentially women’s work all through.”
She had led the way through the scented old-fashioned garden, towards a gate in the farther wall, talking as she went. Now she paused, with her hand on the latch.
“This,” she said, “we call the Transition Gate. It divides our work from our play. On this side of it we have the tennis-court and the croquet, and other games that women love, young or old. But it is all serious business on the other side. And now you shall see our latter-day Eden, with its one unimportant omission.”
As the door swung back to her touch, the murmur that was upon the air grew suddenly in force and volume. Looking through, I saw an old orchard, spacious, sun-riddled, carpeted with green; and, stretching away under the ancient apple-boughs, long, neat rows of hives, a hundred or more, all alive with bees, winnowing the March sunshine with their myriad wings.
Here and there in the shade-dappled pleasance figures were moving about, busily at work among the hives, figures of women clad in trim holland blouses, and wearing bee-veils, through which only a dim guess at the face beneath could be hazarded. Laughter and talk went to and fro in the sun-steeped quiet of the place; and one of the fair bee-gardeners near at hand—young and pretty, I could have sworn, although her blue gauze veil disclosed provokingly little—was singing to herself, as she stooped over an open hive, and lifted the crowded brood-frames one by one up into the light of day.