And then a wicket-gate in the old wall determines the path and your ruminations together. A sudden burst of sunshine; the rich medley of sound from fourscore hives lifting high above the song of the purling stream; and you are out on the broad, green river-bank, looking on at a scene very different from the one you have expected.
There are no old-fashioned hives; they are all of the latest, most scientific pattern, ranged under the shelter of the wall in two wide terraces of close-shaven turf, looking southward over the stream. There are outhouses of the most approved design, where all the business of a modern apiary is going on. Here and there you see black-frocked figures at work, dexterously examining the colonies. There is the deep, whirring note of honey-extractors; the clamour of carpenters’ tools; the faint, sickly smell from the wax-boilers; all the familiar evidences of bee-farming carried on in the most modern, twentieth-century way.
As you look down the long, trim avenue of gaily-painted hives your companion has a quiet side-glance upon you, obviously noting your disappointment.
“What would you?” says he, and his deep voice rings like a passing-bell for all your dreams. “Everything must move with the times, or must inevitably perish. Modernism, rightly understood, is God’s fairest, most priceless gift to the universe. It is a crucible through which all things of true metal must pass to lose the accumulated dross of the ages, keeping their original pure substance, but taking the new shape required of them by latter-day needs. It is so with the old, dim windows of man’s faith; daily the glass is being taken out, smelted down, purified, replaced; we can see abroad into distances now never before visible. And so it must prove even with bee-keeping, which is one of the oldest human occupations in the world.”
He waves his hand towards the sunny prospect before you. Beyond the river the burning apple-woods soar steadily upward; and high above these, stretching away to meet the blue sky, lie the Devon moorlands, once all rose-red with blossoming heather, but now, parched and brown, except where a grey crag or rock puts forth its jagged head.
“It is a fine thing, perhaps,” says the Abbot, thoughtfully swinging his silver cross in the sunbeams, “to love old, ignorant customs, old, benighted, useless errors, for their picturesqueness and beauty alone. But don’t you think it is a still finer thing to teach poor people how they may win from the common hillside plenty of rich, nourishing food at almost no cost at all? And that is what we are doing here. Modern bee-science, it is true, gives us only an ugly utilitarian hive. It sweeps away all the bright, iridescent cobwebs in they path of bee-keeping, and substitutes hard fact for pretty fairy-tale. But the sum of it all is that the poor cottager gains, not twenty or thirty pounds at most of coarse, unsaleable sweet food from his hives, but perhaps hundredweights of pure, choice, section-honey, which, sold in the proper market, will clothe his children comfortably, and make it possible for them to lead decent human lives.”
CHAPTER XVI
BEES AND THEIR MASTERS
There are three great tokens of the coming of spring in the country—the elm-blossom, the cry of the young lambs, and the first rich song of the awakening bees.
All three come together about the end of February or beginning of March, and break into the winter dearth and silence in much the same sudden, unpremeditated way. You look at the woodlands, cowering under the lash of the shrill north wind, and all seems bare and black and lifeless. But the wind dies down in a fiery sunset. With the darkness comes a warm breath out of the west. On the morrow the spring sunshine runs high through all the valleys like liquid gold; the elm-tops are ablaze with purple; from the lambing-pens far and near a new cry lifts into the still, warm air; and in the bee-gardens there is the unwonted, old-remembered symphony, prophetic of the coming summer days.
The shepherd, the bee-man, the woodlander—these three live in the focus of the seasons, and feel their changes long before any other class of country folk. But the bee-man, if he would prosper, must take the sun as his veritable daily guide from year’s end to year’s end. Those whose conception of a bee-keeper is mainly of one who looks on from his cottage door while his winged thousands work for him, and who has but to stretch out his hand once a year to gather the hoard he has had no part in winning, know little of modern beemanship. This would be almost literally true of the old skeppist days, when bees were left much to their own devices, and thirty pounds of indifferent honey was reckoned a good take from a populous hive. But the modern movable comb-frame has altered all that. Now ninety or a hundred pounds weight of honey per hive is expected, with ordinarily good seasons, on a well-managed bee-farm; and in exceptional honey-flows very strong stocks of bees have been known to double and even treble that amount.