The glass was a good one. Now I could plainly make out a movement in this direction. The noise and vibration made by the birds outside had roused the slumbering colony to a sense of danger. About a dozen bees ran out to see what it all meant, and were immediately pounced upon. And then the gun spoke over my head. It was a shot into the air, but it served its harmless purpose. From every bush and tree there came over to us a dull whirr of wings like far-off thunder, as the blue marauders sped away for the open country, filling the air with their frightened jingling note.
Perhaps of all cosy retreats from the winter blast it has ever been my good fortune to discover, the extracting-room on Warrilow bee-farm was the brightest and most comfortable. In summer-time the whole life of the apiary centred here; and the stress and bustle, inevitable during the season of the great honey-flow, obscured its manifold possibilities. But in winter the extracting-machines were, for the most part, silent; and the natural serenity and cosiness of the place reasserted themselves triumphantly. From the open furnace-door a ruddy warmth and glow enriched every nook and corner of the long building. The walls were lined with shelves where the polished tin vessels, in which the surplus honey was stored, gave back the fire-shine in a hundred flickering points of amber light. The work of hive-making in the neighbouring sheds was going briskly forward, but the noise of hammering, the shrill hum of sawing and planing machinery, and the intermittent cough of the oil-engine reached us only as a subdued, tranquil murmur—the very voice of rest.
The bee-master closed the window behind its thick bee-proof curtains, and, putting his gun away in a corner, drew a comfortable high-backed settle near to the cheery blaze. Then he disappeared for a moment, and returned with a dusty cobweb-shrouded bottle, which he carried in a wicker cradle as a butler would bear priceless old wine. The cork came out with a ringing jubilant report, and the pale, straw-coloured liquid foamed into the glasses like champagne. It stilled at once, leaving the whole inner surface of the glass veneered with golden bells. The old bee-man held it up critically against the light.
“The last of 19–,” he said, regretfully. “The finest mead year in this part of the country for many a decade back. Most people have never tasted the old Anglo-Saxon drink that King Alfred loved, and probably Harold’s men made merry with on the eve of Hastings. So they can’t be expected to know that metheglin varies with each season as much as wine from the grape.”
Of the goodness of the liquor there admitted no question. It had the bouquet of a ripe Ribston pippin, and the potency of East Indian sherry thrice round the Horn. But its flavour entirely eluded all attempt at comparison. There was a suggestive note of fine old perry about it, and a dim reminder of certain almost colourless Rhenish wines, never imported, and only to be encountered in moments of rare and happy chance. Yet neither of these parallels came within a sunbeam’s length of the truth about this immaculate honey-vintage of Warrilow. Pondering over the liquor thus, the thought came to me that nothing less than a supreme occasion could have warranted its production to-day. And this conjecture was immediately verified. The bee-master raised his glass above his head.
“To the Bees of Warrilow!” he said, lapsing into the broad Sussex dialect, as he always did when much moved by his theme. “Forty-one years ago to-day the first stock I ever owned was fixed up out there under the old codlin-tree; and now there are two hundred and twenty of them. ’Twas before you were born, likely as not; and bee science has seen many changes since then. In those days there were nothing but the old straw skeps, and most bee-keepers knew as little about the inner life of their bees as we do of the bottom of the South Pacific. Now things are very different; but the improvement is mostly in the bee-keepers themselves. The bees are exactly as they always have been, and work on the same principles as they did in the time of Solomon. They go their appointed way inexorably, and all the bee-master can do is to run on ahead and smooth the path a little for them. Indeed, after forty odd years of bee-keeping, I doubt if the bees even realise that they are ‘kept’ at all. The bee-master’s work has little more to do with their progress than the organ-blower’s with the tune.”
“Can you,” I asked him, as we parted, “after all these years of experience, lay down for beginners in beemanship one royal maxim of success above any other?”
He thought it over a little, the gun on his shoulder again.
“Well, they might take warning from this same King Solomon,” he said, “and beware the foreign feminine element. Let British bee-keepers cease to import queen bees from Italy and elsewhere, and stick to the good old English Black. All my bees are of this strain, and mostly from one pure original Sussex stock. The English black bee is a more generous honey-maker in indifferent seasons; she does not swarm so determinedly, under proper treatment, as the Ligurians or Carniolans; and, above all, though she is not so handsome as some of her Continental rivals, she comes of a hardy northern race, and stands the ups and downs of the British winter better than any of the fantastic yellow-girdled crew from overseas.”