“This is a spare queen,” said he. “’Tis always wise to bring a few to the heather, against any mischance. And now we’ll give her to the motherless bees; and in an hour or two the stock will be at work again as busily as ever.”
CHAPTER IX
THE BEE-HUNTERS
“In that bit of forest,” said the bee-master, indicating a long stretch of neighbouring woodland with one comprehensive sweep of his thumb, “there are tons of honey waiting for any man who knows how to find it.”
I had met and stopped the old bee-keeper and his men, bent on what seemed a rather singular undertaking. They carried none of the usual implements of their craft, but were laden up with the paraphernalia of woodmen—rip-saws and hatchets and climbing-irons, and a mysterious box or two, the use of which I could not even guess at. But the bee-master soon made his errand plain.
“Tons of honey,” he went on. “And we are going to look for some of it. There have been wild bees, I suppose, in the forest country from the beginning of things. Then see how the land lies. There are villages all round, and for ages past swarms have continually got away from the bee-gardens, and hived themselves in the hollow trunks of the trees. Then every year these stray colonies have sent out their own swarms again, until to-day the woods are full of bees, wild as wolves and often as savage, guarding stores that have been accumulating perhaps for years and years.”
He shifted his heavy kit from one shoulder to the other. Overhead the sun burned in a cloudless August sky, and the willow-herb by the roadside was full of singing bees and the flicker of white butterflies. In the hedgerows there were more bees plundering the blackberry blossom, or sounding their vagrant note in the white convolvulus-bells which hung in bridal wreaths at every turn of the way. Beyond the hedgerow the yellow cornlands flowed away over hill and dale under the torrid light; and each scarlet poppy that hid in the rustling gold-brown wheat had its winged musician chanting at its portal. As I turned and went along with the expedition, the bee-master gave me more details of the coming enterprise.
“Mind you,” he said, “this is not good beemanship as the moderns understand it. It is nothing but bee-murder, of the old-fashioned kind. But even if the bees could be easily taken alive, we should not want them in the apiary. Blood counts in bee-life, as in everything else; and these forest-bees have been too long under the old natural conditions to be of any use among the domestic strain. However, the honey is worth the getting, and if we can land only one big stock or two it will be a profitable day’s work.”
We had left the hot, dusty lane, and taken to the field-path leading up through a sea of white clover to the woods above.
“This is the after-crop,” said the bee-master, as he strode on ahead with his jingling burden. “The second cut of Dutch clover always gives the most honey. Listen to the bees everywhere—it is just like the roar of London heard from the top of St Paul’s! And most of it here is going into the woods, more’s the pity. Well, well; we must try to get some of it back to-day.”
Between the verge of the clover-field and the shadowy depths of the forest ran a broad green waggon-way; and here we came to a halt. In the field we had lately traversed the deep note of the bees had sounded mainly underfoot; but now it was all above us, as the honeymakers sped to and fro between the sunlit plane of blossom and their hidden storehouses in the wood. The upper air was full of their music; but, straining the sight to its utmost, not a bee could be seen.