CHAPTER XVII. Bee-Keeping and the Simple Life

BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE

IT is a quality of English sunshine that it comes and goes capriciously, so that no man may be sure of the comradeship of his shadow from day to day. But when there is sunshine in England, it always seems an abiding, permanent force. The grey of yesterday, and the patter-song of the rain on the leaves, were only a dream. You were sleeping under the changeless blue of a summer night, and had but a vision of weeping, drab skies, gone now with the joy that comes in the morning. And to-morrow, when perhaps the old wild scurry of storm-cloud is alive overhead, and all the house resounds with the runnel-music from the pouring eaves, still it will be only a dream. Of a surety you will tell yourself so, as the sun breaks through the griddle of cloud, and the wind relents, and the Dutchman can get to his tailoring; and when you are stepping out amidst the swamp and glitter and rehabilitation of life, as glad of it all as the finches and butterflies that sweep on before you down the lane. The sun shines: you know it has always shone, changeless as Time itself.

With such a faith—unfounded and therefore uncontestable—I came under the glow of one brave June morning, threading field after field of blossoming clover until I stood at the gate of the bee-garden over against the hill. With its name I had long been familiar, for in the county paper there was always the little five-line advertisement, quaintly worded, announcing honey for sale. But I had never yet seen it, nor, indeed, ever set foot in this part of the good Sussex land. So, on this brimming June morning, giving rein for once to the indolent Shank’s mare of moods that is fated to carry me, I set out into the bright sloth, the joyous hastelessness, of the day; and came at length to my destination—to the bee-garden that nestles under the green Downland hills.

It was girt about with a tall hedge of hawthorn, smothered in snowlike blossom, with just that rosy tinge upon it which is the first hectic of decay. Beyond the hedge I could see, stretching aloft, green apple-boughs, whose full-blown posies were alive with the desperate humming energy of countless bees. There was a blue wisp of smoke trailing idly away from a chimney-stack, all that could be seen of the snug thatched cottage within; and there were voices, a leisurely baritone, a sudden peal of laughter high-pitched and obviously a woman’s, and now and then a bar or two of an old song sung in an intermittent, absent-minded way.

In one of the pauses of this song, I raised the latch of the gate. Its sharp click drew to its full lean height a figure at the end of the garden, which was bending down in the midst of a wilderness of hives. As the man came towards me coatless, his rolled-up shirt-sleeves baring wiry brown arms to the hot June sun, I took in all the busy, quiet picture. The red-tiled, winding path, the sea of old-fashioned garden-flowers on every hand, billows of lilac and red-may and laburnum, shadowy blue deeps of forget-me-not, scarlet tulips amidst them like lighthouses, and drifting shallows of amber mignonette. A decent house stood hard by, its windows bright and clean as diamond-facets. There was a gay flicker of linen on a line beyond. An old dog lolled in a straw-filled barrel. A cat kept company with a milk jug on the spotless doorstep. And everywhere there were beehives, each of a different harmonious shade of colour, not ranged in stilted rows, but scattered here and there in twos and threes in the orderless order beloved of bees and unsuburban men.

The bee-master had keen grey eyes, set deep in a sun-blackened, honest face, and the ever-ready tongue of him was that of the beeman all the world over. He was ripe and willing to talk of his work, explaining what he was, and what he had done, as we slowly wandered through his domain. He was a Londoner—he told me—at least, that was his fate half a dozen years ago—a City clerk, pale as the ledger-leaves that fluttered through his fingers from nine to six of the working day. And at home, in a dreary desert of housetops called Nunhead—whither may an unkind fate never lure me—his sisters sewed for a living, white-faced as himself. But one day, in an old second-hand book-shop, he lit upon a threepenny treasure—a book on the management of bees. He read it as his train crawled homeward on one stifling, freezing, fog-bound winter’s night; and there and then, in the mean, dirty cattle-box of a third-class carriage, in fancy the bee-garden was inaugurated, that has since developed into all I saw around me on that brave morning in June.

It was a long time in the doing, he told me, as we sauntered among the busy hives, speaking with a delightful Sussex intonation already veneered upon his Cockney brogue—a long and weary and scraping time. There was money to be saved, the capital needed for the enterprise; and this was no easy matter out of a total family income of forty shillings a week. But at last it was done, and well done. There came a day when the three of them shook the dust of Nunhead from their feet, and took over possession of the little tumbledown cottage with its bare half-acre of neglected ground. Well, those were hard times to begin with—he said, with an unaccountable relish in the recollection;—but now, look how all was changed! He waved a triumphant, proudly proprietary arm around him. The cottage was sound and well furnished throughout. The three or four bought hives, with which he had started his business, had multiplied into sixty or seventy, all made by his own hands. Where had he got the bees? Well, that threepenny book had taught him a secret—the art of bee-driving. Nearly all the cottagers for miles round were in the habit of sulphuring their bees to get at the honey. The first autumn, and every autumn since then, he had gone to his neighbours and told them he would take the bees out of the hives for them, and leave them all the combs and a good trink-geld into the bargain, if they would let him have the bees for his trouble. And they were more than willing. And thus he had gradually built up his little principality of hives.

But, the profit of the thing? This, indeed, was nothing much to boast of. He sold all the honey and wax he got, sending it away, for the most part, by post, and extending the circle of his custom by little and little with every year. Taking the bad years with the good, he had made a net return of £2 for every hive; in bumper-seasons it was always much more. It was not a great deal, but there were only three of them, and their wants were simple. Their greatest needs—fresh air, peace, and quiet, the healthful life of the country—these were to be had for nothing at all. And as for clothes—you never know, until you give over trying to keep up appearances, how very little appearances count in the world. At any rate, for them, the whole thing was a complete success. There were men round about that country-side who farmed whole provinces, and still grumbled; but here was he, getting peace and plenty from half an acre; and as for the girls, they did nothing but laugh and sing all day long.

Thus we wandered and talked; and I—feigning ignorance of bee-matters, lest he might think I was but carrying coals to Newcastle in clumsy charity—bought honey, and asked many questions; and slowly the entire meaning of what had been done by these emancipated slaves of City clerkdom was revealed. The bee-master pushed his old straw hat back over his clever forehead, and lit the most comfortable pipe I had ever set eyes on. He had evidently thought the whole thing out long ago, and got it down to its essential elements.

“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!”

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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.

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THE END

INDEX

Advice to Bee-masters, Butler, 35 After-swarms, 189 Athol Brose, 261 Ancient Roman Hives, 22 Anglo-Saxon Bee-keeping, 22 Antennæ of Bee, Functions of, 155 Ants and Bees, Analogy in Swarming, 178 Aristotle’s Bee-lore, 2 Artificial Food for Bees, 262

Barat-Anac, the Country of Tin, 19 Bee-bikes, 139 breeding, 48 burning, 48 city: problems involved in construction, 202 colony, Progress of, 97 craft, Mediæval, 46 culture in Ancient Britain, 21 driving, 271 farming, Success in, 262 garden, Profits of, 271 gardens, Scarcity of, in England, 257 generation, 33 hives in First Century, 4 in Mythology, v keeping as a Livelihood, 261 in Anglo-Saxon Times, 24 Modern, 47 larva, Spinning of Cocoon, 137 Bee life, Study of, 146 the Old-Age Problem in, 134 lines, 224 masters, Mediæval, 29 milk, its Nature and Uses, 123 166 monarchy, 32 scouts in Swarming, 186 stings, 52 superstitions, 40 under Microscope, 148 Bees and Birds, 87 and Holy Wafer, Story of, 37 and Spiders, 41 Cleansing-flights, 90 English and Foreign, 220 from Dead Lion, 46 Generated in Flowers, 32 in Ancient Egyptian Times, 6 Knowledge of, among Ancients, 30 Bees’ Sense of Smell, 62 Breathing-system of Bee, 163 British Beer (?) in Third Century, B.C. 21 Brood-cells, Cappings of, 140 Dimensions of, 108 nest, Globular Form of, 31 Butler’s “Feminine Monarchie,” 33

Chapel built by Bees, 36 Classic Bee-fathers, 28 Comb built Upwards, 217 cell, Reasons for Hexagonal Shape of, 135 206 Comb-construction, 99, 197, 204 Evolution of, 135 Mathematics of, 208 Supposed Laws of Mutual Interference and Pressure in, 212 Preservation of Verticality in, 215 Communal Mind in Hive, 69 Corsica’s Tribute of Wax to Romans, 16 Country Housewife’s Garden, 42

Dead Bees, Method of Bringing to Life, 46 Decline of Mead-drinking among Saxons, 26 Discipline in Hive, 14 Divine Origin of Bees, 6 Drone, 14, 41, 43, 74, 118 and Worker-eggs, Theory of Laying, 122 His Place in the Hive, 237 Drone-breeding Queen, 110 cells, 213 fly, 10 Drones in Winter, 246 Mid-day Flight, 64 Slaughter of, 244

Egg-stealing by Bees, 111 Emergency Comb, 201 English Black Bee, 76 Ethelwold’s Allowance of Mead to Monks, 24 Evolution in Hive-life, xviii, 79 Eyes of Bee, Compound and Simple, 154

Fanning-army, 59, 92 Strength of Air-current, 62 Fertile Worker, Anomaly of, 144 First Bee-hunter, xi Flight of Bee, Mechanism of, 157 Extent of, 224 of the Drones, 240 Foot of Bee, Construction of, 151 Freemasonry of Bee-keeping, 195 “Further Discovery of Bees,” by Rusden, 1679, 31

Glandular System of Bee, 167 Guard-bees of Hive, 62

Hexagonal Principle in Hive, 134 Hive, Division of Labour in, 83 life, System and Order in, 128 Preparation for Winter, 253 Hiving Swarms, 182 Honey as Hair-restorer, 45 a Manufactured Product, 222 and Sugar: Comparative Values as Food, 259 “Honey-bearing Reed,” 23 Honey-bee, Origin of, 78 bees, Varying Intelligence of, 143 bee’s Year, Beginning of, 84 comb, Construction of, 137 crops, 226 dew, 226 flow, Duration of, 95, 221 from the Skies, 5 Imports, 258 in Mediæval Cookery, 23 In Middle Ages, 24 Medicinal Properties of, 44, 260 Preparation of, for Market, 273 Huber’s Leaf-hive, 30

Ideal Hive, The, 265 Infant Mortality in Bee-life, 63 Insects: Reasons for Bodily Construction, 158 Isle of Honey, 18, 22 Italian Bee, 77

Jaws of Bee, Construction of, 154

Larva-cocoons, Differences in 138 Larva, Hatching of, 72 Laying Queen’s Attendants, 107 Legs of Bee, 149 Life of the Hive, 54 of the Queen, 119 Longevity of Bee, 15

Master-Bees, 42 Matriarchy in the Hive, xiii Mead: Ancient Recipe, 26 in Anglo-Saxon Times, 24, 25 like Canary-sack, 27 making, Modern, 26 Modern Bee-culture: Its Infuence on Bee-life, 190 Hive, Capacity of, 95 Morat, 25 Moses Rusden, King’s Bee-Master, 31

Nectar: Temperature required for its Secretion, 228 Night in the Bee-Garden, 60 Nursery-work in the Hive, 71

Oil of Wax, 45 Old Bee-garden, 51 Overseers in Hive, 64 Oxen-born Bees, 7 Oxymel, 44

Parthenogenesis, 105, 122 Pigment, 25 Pliny and the Bee, 11 Pliny’s Mirror-stone Hive, 30 Poison-sac of Bee: Its Contents, 223 Pollen from Evening Primrose, 34 gathering, 32, 55 loads, Homogeneity of, 57 Sources of, 56 Prehistoric Man and Honey-Bee, x Propolis: Its Nature and Uses, 57, 204

Queen and Worker: Differences in Bodily Structure, 101 Eggs, Identity of, 100 Queen-bee, 34, 41, 68, 71, 86 Apparent Rulership of, 96 Battle-cry of, 166, 193 Death of, 115 Duration of Life, 255 Fecundity of, 72 Fertilisation of, 121 Hatching of, 113 Her Mating-flight, 72, 117 in Swarming-time, 178 Physiology of, 101 Rearing of, 103 Supersession of, 109 the Original Female Bee, 98 Workers’ Management of, 123 cell, Construction of, 100, 110 larva Feeding of, 113 Rearing of, 99 Queenless Hives, 105, 144 Queens: Five in Single Hive, 96 Mutual Antagonism, 114 Plurality of, in Hive, 94

Reason and Instinct, 69 “Ringing the Bees,” Roman Origin of, 38 Robber-bees, 144, 250

Samson and the Lion, 11 Sanitation in the Hive, 88 Sexes, Proportion of, in Hive, 124 Sex-question in Hive, xvi Sirius, the Honey-Star, 13 Skep, Ancient Method of Dressing, 37 Small-holder and Bee-keeping, 259 Socialism and Hive-life, 75, 130 Soot-fungus, 229 Sororicide in the Hive, 120 Sources of Honey, 230 Sting of Bee, Construction of, 170 Sugar-cane, First Introduction of, 23 Swarm-hiving, First Century, 5 in Middle Ages, 37 Swarm in May, 174 Legal Rights in, 40 Site selected by, 185 Swarming, 38 Impulse, 96, 175 Objects of, 189 Signs of, 182

Temper in Bees, 219 Temperature of Hive, 91, 161 Tongue of Bee, Construction of, 152

Undertakers in Hive, 63

Variation in Hive-rules, 94 Ventilation of Hive, 60, 91 Virgil as Bee-master, 2 Voice-apparatus of Bee, 163

Wax, 15, 198 Ancient Sources of, 16 Bees’ Method of Working, 201 in the Bronze Age, xi Medicinal Properties of, 44 making, Food Consumed during, 161 production, a Profitable Industry, 266 Water, Need of, in Hive, 84 Winter-feeding, Method of, 86 life in Hive, 86 Worker-bee, 81, 85, 233 Age of, 85, 254 Artificial Creation of, 130 Birth of, 140 Early Life in Hive, 141 Glandular System of, 142 Supremacy of, in Hive, 68 Various Occupations of, 127 larvæ, Feeding of, 131

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FOOTNOTE.

{218} Dr. Herbert MacDonald Phillpotts, of Kingswear, Devon.