The old ragged-winged bees, that have stood the brunt of the season, are now, too, nearly all gone. The hives are filled with bees of the same race, inspired by the same traditions; but they are at the beginning of life, the raw recruits of destiny, a mere stop-gap crew. They have no memories of the time when work was a fever, a tumultuous race with the sun, in which the swiftest must lag behind. They have never known the over-weighty cargoes, the bursting honey-sacs, and pollen-panniers so laden that they could be scarce dragged into the hive, and they will never know them. These bees, born late in the season, have their lot cast in the torpid backwaters of their little world. Theirs is to be but a dreary eking out of days, so that they may have strength enough to warm the first spring broods into life. The few hot days that burn in the midst of the snows of each English March—immeasurably far off now, and unattainable, seemingly—will be all they will ever see of the power of sunshine. Winter bees are born to the prison-house; and in it, and for it, live and die.
At the most, a worker-bee sees but six months of life: at the least—and this is the lot of many—she withstands the incessant wear and tear of her hard calling for six, or possibly eight, weeks. Thus, though the hive may be always packed with citizens, the population is for ever changing. Half a dozen times in the year, perhaps, and for a score of years, you may go to your bee-garden, and each time move among tens of thousands to whom you are an utter stranger, and whom you have never seen before. And yet, in all its customs, its propensities, its traditions, the life of the bees is Continuity impersonified. You may go round the world, and spend ten years on the journey; and, coming back to the old leafy nook of the country, find the old green hive still in its corner under the lilac, still the centre of what seems the same crowd of winged merchant-women sailing home under the same gay colours, singing the old glad songs, building the old wondrous fabrics in the darkness, transmuting the same fragrant essences into the same elixir of gold. And what is this mysterious thing called the Bee-Commonwealth, which is alone immortal, while all that composes it, and pertains to it, and upholds it, passes and dies?
You must not forget the queen-bee here. She alone, it must be remembered, persists year in and year out, while generation after generation of her children grow up and die about her—a hundred thousand of them, may-be, in each twelve-month, thousands even between one single summer dawn and the dusk of the western sky. Methuselah of old, on the more moderate human scale, must have had some such experience—must have divined the broader plan of life from the incessant repetitions of chance and change that passed before him. The power to generalise into symbols comes only to the ancient of days; and he of all men had learnt to fathom, to estimate, to winnow out the sober drab grain from the glittering, rainbow chaff of life. Over and over again he must have kept the true true to itself with one wise word, and turned back the false, dazzled and discomfited, with one flash from his mirror of the ages. He was a living history-book, where all men might read the common drift and outcome of life; and as a record of the hive’s story, a living archive for its plans, its systems, its ideals, the mother-bee may exist to day—she who, in comparison with its ever coming and going thousands, is an age-old, imperishable thing.
And so you may think of her, in the short days of December twilight, or in the interminable night-darkness full of the raging of the winter wind, gathering her children about her, and telling them tales of their forbears’ prowess; teaching them old bee-songs which have but the one refrain of work and winning; and never forgetting her own little story—of the one brief hour of her love-flight and marriage, bought and paid for by widowhood lasting her whole life.
CHAPTER XVI
THE MODERN BEE-FARM
It is well enough to consider the scientific side of hive-life for its intrinsic interest, to treat it for what it really is—one of the most absorbing studies available for leisure hours. But the honey-bee is something more than a wonder-maker, or a peg on which to hang dilettante moralisms. Rightly treated and exactly understood, she can be made of great use in the world.
There are two things in this England of ours which profoundly astonish all who love bees, and have a true conception of their possibilities. Travel where you may in the land, the last thing you are likely to meet with is a bee-farm, or even a few hives in a cottage-garden; while every yard of your way has its nook of blossom, and every mile its stretch of flowery pasture, where, in sober truth, tons of honey are annually running to waste. All this could be garnered and sold to the people at little trouble and great profit, if only enterprise would wake up from its island-lethargy and stretch forth the hand. But the years dribble uselessly by, and nothing is done. Here and there a wide-awake husbandman gets a little township of hives together, sells in the neighbourhood all the honey his bees make, and puts to his pocket a gold and silver lining. But this is only a drop in the ocean, and the British people must send abroad for their honey, which they do to the pretty tune of more than £30,000 a year.
Hitherto, reasoning backward from effect to cause, it would seem that farming has been remunerative only when undertaken on a large scale; but those who can read the signs of the times tell us that the age, just dawning to the country-side, will be the age of the small man. And this must mean that the hereditary aristocracy among crops—wheat, oats, barley—will slowly give place to little-culture: in a word, that the land will be made to produce, not the things that tradition and our yeoman family pride have ordained as the be-all and end-all of farming, but the minor, humble necessities for which each town and village should look to the good brown earth immediately about it, but at present looks in vain. Farmers’ ladies may then no longer sit in their drawing-rooms and ride in their carriages, but that will be a change for the simpler, more proportionate. Those who live in towns have little conception of it; but the country-dweller knows well what complexity and luxury have got into the old English farmhouses, for all the outcry about hard times; how the farmer’s wife no longer goes to her dairy, nor makes any of the good old farmhouse things that served to uphold country England in days gone by; and how the master-agriculturists now are the sinews of the great London Stores, while the little local shopkeepers are left to the field-labourer with his twelve or fifteen shillings a week.
For the class of small-holders that must now multiply throughout the length and breadth of the land, there is awaiting an enterprise—a source of livelihood—as yet hardly tapped. A stock subject of envy with most artisans is the capitalist who leads an easy life while his factory hands toil for him. But if the small-holder will take up bee-keeping, he too can look on, to a large extent, while his thousands of winged labourers are filling his storehouse with some of the most useful and saleable merchandise in the world. It is a truism in commerce that a good supply creates a demand just as certainly as that the universal want of a thing stimulates its production. One of the needs in England to-day is a full, good, and cheap supply of honey; and when this is forthcoming there will be little fear but that the present demand will increase hand over hand.
There are many reasons why the people should choose honey for their principal food rather than the beet sugar which is now so largely consumed. In the first place, honey is a pure, natural, undoctored sweet, while in the manufacture of ordinary sugar the use of more or less noxious chemicals seems to be indispensable. When a stock of bees must be artificially fed, and common grocers’ sugar is used for the purpose, the result is generally that half the stock is poisoned by the chemicals with which the sugar has been treated at the mill. And if this is its effect on bees, the inference must be that it cannot prove altogether wholesome for men. But its purity is not the chief reason why honey should be the universal sweet-food of the people. Honey is the ordinary sugar of nectar concentrated and converted into what is chemically known as grape-sugar; and thus, in ripe honey, the first and most important part of digestion is already effected before it leaves the comb. This explains why so many delicate people, and particularly children, can assimilate food sweetened with honey, when they can take no other form of sweet.