It is here that we get a glimpse into the ways of the honey-bee that may well give spur to the most wonder-satiated amongst us. If a sample of fresh nectar is examined, it will be found to consist of about seventy per cent of water, the small remainder of its bulk being made up of what is chemically known as cane sugar, together with a trace of certain essential oils and aromatic principles. It is practically nothing but sweetened and flavoured water. But ripe honey shows a very different composition. The oils and essences are there, with some added acids; but of water there is no more than seven to ten per cent; practically the entire bulk of good honey consists of sugar, but it is grape sugar, with scarce a trace of the cane sugar which nectar exclusively contains. To put the thing in plainest words—the economic honey-bee, finding herself with three or four months to get through at the least possible cost in energy and nutriment, has scientifically reasoned out the matter, and, among other ingenious provisions, has arranged to subject her winter food to a process of pre-digestion during the summer, so that when she consumes it there shall be neither force expended in its assimilation nor waste products taken with it, needing to be afterwards expelled. Honey, in fact, is the nectar digested, and then regurgitated just when it is ready to be absorbed into the system. It is almost certain that every drop goes through this process twice, and possibly three times, in each case by different bees; and the heat of the hive still further contributes to the object in view by driving off the superfluous moisture from the nectar so treated, and thus concentrating it into an almost perfect food.
CHAPTER XV
IN THE ABBOT’S BEE-GARDEN
Standing in the lane without, and looking up at the grey forbidding walls of the old abbey, you wondered how anything human could exist on the other side; but, once past the heavy iron-studded gate, your thoughts doubled like hares in the opposite direction.
It seemed good to be a monk, if life could be all sunshine, and quietude, and beauty like that. As you waited in the shadow of the great stone-flagged portico, while your coming was announced, this feeling grew deeper with every moment. The garden sloped down to the river’s edge, winding footway, and green lawn, and kitchen-plot all alike girdled and barricaded with rich-hued autumn flowers. Through the mass of crimson fuchsia and many-coloured dahlia and hollyhock, bowers of pink and white geranium with stems as thick as your wrist, ancient apple-trees drooping under their burden of scarlet fruit, crowding jungles of roses, you could see the bright waters sweeping by, and hear their busy sound as they won a way amidst the rocky boulders strewing the bed of the tortuous Devon stream.
Here and there in the sunny field-of-view visible through the arched doorway, black-robed figures were quietly at work: some digging; others gathering apples in the orchard; one sturdy brother was mowing the Abbot’s lawn, the bright blade coming perilously near his fluttering skirts at every stroke; another went by trundling a wheelbarrow full of green vegetables for the refectory table. There was a distant cackle of poultry, blending oddly with the solemn chant that came from the chapel hard by. Robins sang everywhere, and starlings clucked and whistled in the valerian that topped the great encircling wall. But wherever you looked, whatever drew away your attention for the moment, you were sure to come back to the consideration of one preponderant yet inexplicable thing. A steady, deep note was upon the air. Rich and resonant, it seemed to come from all directions at once. The dim, grey-vaulted entrance-porch was full of it. Looking up into the dusk of oaken beams overhead, there it seemed at its strangest and loudest. Queerest fact of all, it appeared to have some mysterious affinity with the sunshine, for when a stray white argosy of cloud came drifting over the azure and obscured for a minute the glad light, this full, sonorous note died suddenly away, rising as swiftly again to its old power and volume when the sunbeams glowed back once more over the spacious garden, and over the riverside willows that shed their gold of dying leafage with every breath of the soft south wind.
It was not until you stepped outside, and looked upward over the face of the old building, that you realised what it all meant. From its foundation to the highest stone of the ancient bell-turret, the whole front of the place was thickly mantled with ivy in full flower, and every yellow tuft of blossom was besieged with bees. There seemed tens of thousands of them, hovering and humming everywhere; and thousands more arriving with every moment out of the blue air, or darting off again fully laden, and away to some invisible bourne over the ruddy roof of orchard trees.
Intent on this vociferous wonder, you do not catch the footfall on the gravel-path in your rear, or see the sombre figure of the Abbot as he comes towards you, the sweep of his black frock setting all the marigolds nodding behind him, as though from a sudden flaw of wind. And now you have another pleasurable disillusionment as to monkish conditions of being. Trudging along the deep-cut Devonshire lanes on your way to the Abbey, through the rain of falling autumn leaves, you pictured the place to yourself as a kind of sacred sink of desolation, inhabited by a crew of sour-visaged anchorites, who found only godlessness in sunshine, and in cakes-and-ale nothing but assured perdition. But here, coming towards you, smiling, and with outstretched hand, is the last kind of human being you expected to see. Clad from head to foot in sober black, with, for ornament, but the one plain silver cross swinging at his breast, the Abbot shows, unmistakably, for a gentleman of cultured and enlightened mien. A fine, swarthy face, kind, calm eyes behind gold spectacles, a voice like an old violin, and a grip of the hand that makes you wince with its abounding welcome, all combine to set you there and then at your ease; and talk begins at once on the old, familiar plane among bee-keepers—the quick, enthusiastic interchange, each participant as ready a listener as learner, common all the world over, wherever flowers grow and men love bees.
The brothers of the old Benedictine monastery—so the Abbot tells you, as he leads the way towards the hives, through the sun-riddled labyrinth—have kept bees, probably, for more than a thousand years. There is no doubt that the original abbey building stood there, in the wooded cleft of Devon valley, so long ago as the sixth century, nor little question that its founder was a bee-man, for he was contemporary and friend of the great St Modonnoc who himself first taught Irishmen to keep bees.
“Monks, in the very earliest times, were almost invariably apiculturists,” argues the Abbot. He stops in the orchard, the more impressively to quote Latin, the glib leaf-shadows playing the while over his tonsured head. “Lac et mel; panis, vena rudis. Milk and honey, and coarse oaten bread. At least we know, from our chronicles, that these were the common daily fare of our Order more than eight hundred years ago; and honey remains a part of our food to this day.”
Thus overawed with the centuries, you begin to form a mental picture of the bee-garden you are about to visit, voyaging so pleasantly through winding path and shady thicket, with the bell-like sound of the water growing clearer and clearer at every step. With all that hoary tradition of the ages behind them, you promise yourself, these monks will have clung to their bee-keeping mediævalism as to some sacred, inviolable thing. There will be no movable comb-frames, nor American sections, nor weird, foreign races of bees. They will never have heard even of foul-brood, or napthol-beta, or the host of things that bless or curse modern apiculture at every turn of the way. But, instead, there will be a tangled wilderness of late blossom, such as only Devonshire can show in November; dome-shaped hives of straw, each with its singing company about it; perhaps a superannuated brother or two quietly making straw hackles to shield the hives against coming winter weather; even, perchance, the smell of burning brimstone on the air, as the last remnant of the honey-harvest is gathered in the ancient way, by “taking up” the strongest and the weakest colonies of bees.