“What we are doing here,” he said, “could be done by hundreds of others who are still in London in what was once our old plight. Large bee-farms are all very well, but they are more or less a thing of the future—something that is still to be evolved out of twentieth-century needs. But the bee-garden has its immediate use and place in every district where there is an average population. People generally have got out of the habit of eating honey because it is so seldom on sale in the shops; but if you steadily and continuously remind them of it, they will buy, and soon grow to wonder how they did without it for so long. But it must be set before them in an attractive way. Run-honey must be bright and pure to look at, and neatly bottled and labelled. If you sell honey in the comb, the section-boxes must be spotlessly clean and white. In that old book that first led me to bee-keeping, it says that only the English bee should be kept, because it is a better honey-gatherer. But, from the salesman’s point of view, there is a much more weighty reason for abjuring all foreign strains of bees. English bees leave a thin film of air between the honey and the cell cappings, and the result is that the comb always looks perfectly white. But nearly all foreigners fill their cells to the brim, and this means that the finest honeycomb will have a dark and dirty appearance, and no one will be tempted to buy. That is the sort of thing a business-man thinks of first, so the old training days in London have not been altogether without their use even here.”
The song, aloof and desultory, that I had heard from the garden-gate, was growing clearer as we walked; and now we turned the house-corner, and came upon more hives, with a neat, girlish figure busy among them; and, hard by, a tiny laundry-shed, wherein I caught a glimpse of brown arms deep in a wash-tub, and heard the last stanza of the vagulous song.
“Hetty, there,” explained the bee-master, “helps in the garden, and— Helps, did I say? Why, she is far and away a better hand at it than I. There is so much in hive-work that needs the light touch which only a woman can give. And Deborah, she keeps house for us. Did you know that the word Deborah was Hebrew for a honey-bee? But come and see where I make the hives on winter days, and where we sling the honey, and fill the super-crates with the sections, and all the rest of it.”
He showed me then his workshop and a little gauze-windowed shed where there was a homemade honey-extractor—a cunning, centrifugal thing by which the combs could be emptied and restored unbroken to the bees, to be charged again and again. And there was a storehouse, where long rows of honey-jars, and stacks of sections, and blocks of pale yellow wax were waiting for the purchaser, and a packing-shed where the postboxes of corrugated cardboard were made up. Finally there was pointed out to me, in a far-off corner of the garden, a donkey—shaggy, well-fed, placidly browsing—and, under a neighbouring pent-roof, a little cart that was a curiosity in its way. Its wooden tilt was made to represent a big beehive, and on it was painted the name of the bee-garden and a list of hive-products which it carried for sale. The bee-master put an admiring hand upon it.
“It was all Hetty’s idea,” he said. “London girls for pluck, you know! And she goes into the town with it once a fortnight in the season; takes it away crammed full, mind, and never brings back an ounce! Somehow or other, I think those girls ought to change names!”
Journeying back to the railroad-station under the eternal English sunshine and through the chain of blossoming fields, I listened to the chant of the bees around me; and though it was the familiar sound of a lifetime, there was something in it then which I had never heard before. The rich note rose and fell; died down to silence as the path led through impregnable red-clover; swelled again as the land paled to the rosy hue of the sainfoin; burst out into a loud, glad symphony where a patch of charlock blent its despised, uncoveted gold with the farmer’s drill. “You thought you knew our ways of life from Alpha to Omega”—so seemed to run, in fancy, the wavering refrain. “You have pried upon us day and night, in season and out of season. You have chloroformed us, vivisected us, torn our dead sisters limb from limb to feed the cruel, glittering eyes of that binocular of yours. You have come at last to think that there was nothing about us, within or without or round about, that you had not got to know. And here a common City clerk, turned tail on his hereditary duty, has shown you, in one short hour, a whole sheaf of things about us which you—Peeping Tom that you are!—in a whole life’s keyhole-prying have never guessed. Out upon you! You deserve to have to do with nothing better than bumble-bees for the rest of your days!”
For the more I thought of little bee-gardens, such as the one I had just visited, established here, there, and everywhere throughout the land, the plainer it became that this, after all, was a mission for the honey-bee that had quite escaped me; and the fonder of the idea I grew. With bee-keeping on a grand scale there was the difficulty that an apiary might become too large for the resources of the country about it, although it is all but certain that crops grown specially for bees can be made to pay. But a small garden could never exhaust the land within its necessary three-mile radius, and all the nectar its bees could gather would be obtained free. Nunhead has done it gloriously, thought I, tramping steadily onward through the clover. And why not all the other Nunheads that hem in the great cities? There must be plenty who love the dust and din, and are willing to stop there; so the little band of bee-gardeners will never be missed.
And there was something else I thought of, too, as I strode along under the English sunshine which lasts for ever, swinging my box of superfluous, yet much-prized honey as I went.
The song and that pleasant ripple of laughter—they were in my ears still, and mingling with the labour-song of the wayside bees. Now, only a dozen miles or so, away over the hill-tops in the blue Sussex weald, I knew of just such another bee-garden, where two brothers—not Londoners this time, but true-born Downland lads—had well established themselves, were getting comfortably off, but were still single men. And only a week ago they had deplored this fact to me, and— But avast! Match-making was never yet to be reckoned part of the Lore of the Honey-Bee.
THE END