The moon was just tilting over the tree-tops. In its dim light the place looked double its actual size. We seemed to stand in the midst of a great town of bee-dwellings, stretching vaguely away into the darkness. And from every hive there rose the clear deep murmur of the ventilating bees.
The bee-master lighted his lantern, and held it down close to the entrance of the nearest hive.
“Look how they form up in rows, one behind the others with their heads to the hive; and all fanning with their wings! They are drawing the hot air out. Inside there is another regiment of them, but those are facing the opposite way, and drawing the cool air in. And so they keep the hive always at the right temperature for honey-making, and for hatching out the young bees.”
“Who was it,” he asked ruminatively, as the gate of the bee-farm closed at last behind us, and we were walking homeward through the glimmering dusk of the lane—“who was it first spoke of the ‘busy bee’? Busy! ’Tis not the word for it! Why, from the moment she is born to the day she dies the bee never rests nor sleeps! It is hard work night and day, from the cradle-cell to the grave; and in the honey-season she dies of it after a month or so. It is only the drone that rests. He is very like some humans I know of his own sex; he lives an idle life, and leaves the work to the womenkind. But the drone has to pay for it in the end, for the drudging woman-bee revolts sooner or later. And then she kills him. In bee-life the drone always dies a violent death; but in human life—well, it seems to me a little bee-justice wouldn’t be amiss with some of them.”
CHAPTER VIII
IN A BEE-CAMP
“’Tis a good thing—life; but ye never know how good, really, till you’ve followed the bees to the heather.”
It was an old saying of the bee-master’s, and it came again slowly from his lips now, as he knelt by the camp-fire, watching the caress of the flames round the bubbling pot. We were in the heart of the Sussex moorland, miles away from the nearest village, still farther from the great bee-farm where, at other times, the old man drove his thriving trade. But the bees were here—a million of them perhaps—all singing their loudest in the blossoming heather that stretched away on every side to the far horizon, under the sweltering August sun.
Getting the bees to the moors was always the chief event of the year down at the honey-farm. For days the waggons stood by the laneside, all ready to be loaded up with the best and most populous hives; but the exact moment of departure depended on one very uncertain factor. The white-clover crop was almost at an end. Every day saw the acreage of sainfoin narrowing, as the sheep-folds closed in upon it, leaving nothing but bare yellow waste, where had been a rolling sea of crimson blossom. But the charlock lay on every hillside like cloth-of-gold. Until harvest was done the fallows were safe from the ploughshare, and what proved little else than a troublesome weed to the farmer was like golden guineas growing to every keeper of bees.
But at last the new moon brought a sharp chilly night with it, and the long-awaited signal was given. Coming down with the first grey glint of morning from the little room under the thatch, I found the bee-garden in a swither of commotion. A faint smell of carbolic was on the air, and the shadowy figures of the bee-master and his men were hurrying from hive to hive, taking off the super-racks that stood on many three and four stories high. The honey-barrows went to and fro groaning under their burdens; and the earliest bees, roused from their rest by this unwonted turmoil, filled the grey dusk with their high timorous note.
The bee-master came over to me in his white overalls, a weird apparition in the half-darkness.