“You may think,” said she, “that what I advocate, though successful in our own single instance, might prove impracticable on a widely extended scale. Well, do you know that last year close upon three hundred and fifty tons of honey were imported into Great Britain from foreign sources, [43] just because our home apiculturists were unable to cope with the national demand? And this being so, is it too much to think that, if women would only band themselves together and take up bee-keeping systematically, as we have done, all or most of that honey could be produced—of infinitely better quality—here, on our own British soil?”
CHAPTER V
A BEE-MAN OF THE ’FORTIES
The old bee-garden lay on the verge of the wood. Seen from a distance it looked like a great white china bowl brimming over with roses; but a nearer view changed the porcelain to a snowy barrier of hawthorn, and the roses became blossoming apple-boughs, stretching up into the May sunshine, where all the bees in the world seemed to have forgathered, filling the air with their rich wild chant.
Coming into the old garden from the glare of the dusty road, the hives themselves were the last thing to rivet attention. As you went up the shady moss-grown path, perhaps the first impression you became gratefully conscious of was the slow dim quiet of the place—a quiet that had in it all the essentials of silence, and yet was really made up of a myriad blended sounds. Then the sheer carmine of the tulips, in the sunny vista beyond the orchard, came upon you like a trumpet-note through the shadowy aisles of the trees; and after this, in turn, the flaming amber of the marigolds, broad zones of forget-me-nots like strips of the blue sky fallen, snow-drifts of arabis and starwort, purple pansy-spangles veering to every breeze. And last of all you became gradually aware that every bright nook or shade-dappled corner round you had its nestling bee-skep, half hidden in the general riot of blossom, yet marked by the steadier, deeper song of the homing bees.
To stand here, in the midst of the hives, of a fine May morning, side by side with the old bee-man, and watch with him for the earliest swarms of the year, was an experience that took one back far into another and a kindlier century. There were certain hives in the garden, grey with age and smothered in moss and lichen, that were the traditional mother-colonies of all the rest. The old bee-keeper treasured them as relics of his sturdy manhood, just as he did the percussion fowling-piece over his mantel; and pointed to one in particular as being close on thirty years old. Nowadays remorseless science has proved that the individual life of the honey-bee extends to four or five months at most; but the old bee-keeper firmly believed that some at least of the original members of this colony still flourished in green old age deep in the sombre corridors of the ancient skep. Bending down, he would point out to you, among the crowd on the alighting-board, certain bees with polished thorax and ragged wings worn almost to a stump. While the young worker-bees were charging in and out of the hive at breakneck speed, these superannuated amazons doddered about in the sunlight, with an obvious and pathetic assumption of importance. They were really the last survivors of the bygone winter’s brood. Their task of hatching the new spring generation was over; and now, the power of flight denied to them, they busied themselves in the work of sentinels at the gate, or in grooming the young bees as they came out for their first adventure into the far world of blossoming clover under the hill.
For modern apiculture, with its interchangeable comb-frames and section-supers, and American notions generally, the old bee-keeper harboured a fine contempt. In its place he had an exhaustless store of original bee-knowledge, gathered throughout his sixty odd years of placid life among the bees. His were all old-fashioned hives of straw, hackled and potsherded just as they must have been any time since Saxon Alfred burned the cakes. Each bee-colony had its separate three-legged stool, and each leg stood in an earthen pan of water, impassable moat for ants and “wood-li’s,” and such small honey-thieves. Why the hives were thus dotted about in such admired but inconvenient disorder was a puzzle at first, until you learned more of ancient bee-traditions. Wherever a swarm settled—up in the pink-rosetted apple-boughs, under the eaves of the old thatched cottage, or deep in the tangle of the hawthorn hedge—there, on the nearest open ground beneath, was its inalienable, predetermined home. When, as sometimes happened, the swarm went straight away out of sight over the meadows, or sailed off like a pirouetting grey cloud over the roof of the wood, the old bee-keeper never sought to reclaim it for the garden.
“’Tis gone to the shires fer change o’ air,” he would say, shielding his bleak blue eyes with his hand, as he gazed after it. “’Twould be agen natur’ to hike ’em back here along. An’ naught but ill-luck an’ worry wi’out end.”
He never observed the skies for tokens of to-morrow’s weather, as did his neighbours of the countryside. The bees were his weather-glass and thermometer in one. If they hived very early after noon, though the sun went down in clear gold and the summer night loomed like molten amethyst under the starshine, he would prophesy rain before morning. And sure enough you were wakened at dawn by a furious patter on the window, and the booming of the south-west wind in the pine-clad crest of the hill. But if the bees loitered afield far into the gusty crimson gloaming, and the loud darkness that followed seemed only to bring added intensity to the busy labour-note within the hives, no matter how the wind keened or the griddle of black storm-cloud threatened, he would go on with his evening task of watering his garden, sure of a morrow of cloudless heat to come.
He knew all the sources of honey for miles around; and, by taste and smell, could decide at once the particular crop from which each sample had been gathered. He would discriminate between that from white clover or sainfoin; the produce of the yellow charlock wastes; or the orchard-honey, wherein it seemed the fragrance of cherry-bloom was always to be differentiated from that of apple or damson or pear. He would tell you when good honey had been spoilt by the grosser flavour of sunflower or horse-chestnut; or when the detestable honey-dew had entered into its composition; or, the super-caps having been removed too late in the season, the bees had got at the early ivy-blossom, and so degraded all the batch.