THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN
“BOOKS,” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, looking round through grey
wreaths of tobacco-smoke at his crowded shelves, “books seem to tell ye
most things ne’ersome-matter; but when it comes to books on bees—well,
’tis somehow quite another pair o’ shoes.”
He stopped to listen to the wind, blowing great guns outside in the
winter darkness. The little cottage seemed to crouch and shudder beneath
the blast, and the rain drove against the lattice-windows with a sobbing,
timorous note. The bee-master drew the old oak settle nearer to the
fire, and sat for a moment silently watching the comfortable blaze.
“‘True as print,’” he went on, lapsing more and more into the quaint,
tangy Sussex dialect, as his theme impressed him; “’twas an old saying o’
my father’s; and right enough, maybe, in his time. A’ couldn’t read, to
be sure; so a’ might have been ower unsceptical. But books was too
expensive in those days to put many lies into.”
He took down at random from the case on the chimney-breast about a dozen
modern, paper-covered treatises on bee-keeping, and threw them, rather
contemptuously, on the table.
“I’m not saying, mind ye,” he hastened to add, “that there’s a word
against truth in any one of them. They’re all true enough, no doubt, for
they contradict each other at every turn. ’Tis as if one man said roses
was white; and another said, ‘No, you’re wrong, they’re yaller’; and a
third said, ‘Y’are both wrong, they’re red.’ And when folks are in
dispute in this way, because they agree, and not because they differ,
there’s little hope of ever pacifying them.
“I heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years ago, that had a good word
about bees. Said she, ‘They never do anything invariably’; and she
warn’t far off the truth. She knew her own sex, did wise Mrs Tupper.
Now, the trouble with the book-writers on bees is that they try to make a
science of something that can never rightly be a science at all. They
try to add two numbers together that they don’t know, an’ that are allers
changing, and are surprised if they don’t arrive at an exact total.
There’s the bees, and there’s the weather: together the result will be so
many pounds of honey. If the English climate went by the calendar, and
the bees worked according to unchangeable rules, you might reckon out
your honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping would be little more
than sitting in a summer-house and figuring on a slate. But with frosts
in June, and August weather in February, and your honey-makers naught but
a tribe of whimsy, sex-thwarted wimmin-folk, a nation of everlasting
spinsters—how can bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of
walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist an’ turn o’ the way
shows something cur’ous or different?”
He stopped to recharge his pipe from the earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like
an old straw beehive, which had yielded solace to many a past generation
of the Warrilow clan.
“’Tis just this matter of sex,” he continued, “that these book-writing
bee-masters seem to leave altogether out of their reckoning. And yet it
lies well to the heart of the whole business. In an average prosperous
hive there are about thirty thousand of these little stunted,
quick-witted worker-bees, not one of which but could have grown into a
fully-developed mother-bee, twice the size, and laying her thousands of
eggs a day, if only her early bringings-up had been different. But
nature has doomed her to be an old maid from her very cradle, although
she is born with all the instincts and capabilities for motherhood that
you wonder at in a fully grown, prolific queen. And yet the bee-masters
expect her to accept her fate without a murmur; to live and work to-day
just as she did yesterday and the day before; to tend and feed patiently
the young bees that she has been denied all part in producing; to support
a lot of lazy drones in luxury and idleness; and generally to act like a
reasonable, contented, happy creature all the way through.”
He took three or four long, contemplative pulls at his Broseley clay,
then came back to his subject and his dialect together.
“’Tis no wonder,” said he “that the little worker-bee gets crotchety time
an’ again. Wimmin-creeturs is all of much the same kidney, whether ’tis
bees or humans. Their natur’ is not to look ahead, but just to do the
next thing. They sees sideways mostly, like a horse with an eye-shade
but no blinkers. But now and then they ups and looks straight afore ’em,
and then ’tis trouble brewing fer masters o’ all kinds, whether in hives
or homes o’ men. Lot’s wife, she were a kind o’ bee-woman; and so were
Eve. I’d ha’ been glad to ha’ knowed ’em both, bless ’em! The world ’ud
be all the sweeter fer a few more like they. Harm done through being too
much of a woman-creetur is never all harm in the long run, depend on’t.”
With his great sunburnt hand he stirred the flimsy, dog-eared pamphlets
about thoughtfully, as a man will stir leaves with a stick.
[Picture: “A Natural Honey-Bees’ Nest”]
“Now, ’tis just this way with bees,” he went on. “If you study how to
keep ’em busy, with plain, right-down necessity hard at their heels, all
goes well. The bees have no time for anything but work. As the supers
fill with honey you take them off and put empty ones in their place. The
queen below fills comb after comb with eggs, and you make the brood-nest
larger and larger. There is allers more room everywhere, dropped down
from the skies, like; no matter how fast the stock increases, nor how
much the bees bring in. Just their plain day’s work is enough, and
more’n enough, for the best of them. And so the summer heat goes by; the
honey harvest is ended; and the bees have had no chance to dwell upon,
and grow rebellious over, the wise wrong that nature has done their sex.
In bee-life ’tis always evil that’s wrought, not by want o’ thought, but
by too much of it. Bad beemanship is just giving bees time to think.”
“Many’s the time,” continued the bee-master, thrusting the bowl of his
empty pipe into the heart of the wood-embers for lustration, and taking a
clean one down for immediate use from the rack over his head; “many’s the
time an’ oft it has come ower me that perhaps bees warn’t allers as we
see them now. Maybe, way back in the times when England was a tropic
country, tens of thousands o’ years ago, there was no call for them to
live packed together in one dark chamber, as they do to-day. If the year
was warm all the twelve months through, and flowers allers blooming,
there ’ud be no need fer a winter-larder, nor fer any hives at all. Like
as not each woman-bee lived by herself then, in some dry nook or other;
made her little nest of comb, and brought up her own children, happy and
comfortable. Maybe, even—and I can well believe it of her, knowing her
natur’ as I do—she kept a gurt, buzzing, blusterous drone about the place
an’ let him eat and drink in idleness while she did all the work, willing
enough, for the two. Then, as the world slowly cooled down through the
centuries, there came a short time in each year when the flowers ceased
to bloom, and the bees found they had to put by a store of honey, to last
till the heat and the blossoms showed up again. And there was another
thing they must have found out when the cold spell was over the earth.
Bees that kept apart by themselves died of cold, but those that huddled
together in crowds lived warm enough throughout the winter. The more
there were of ’em the warmer they kept, and the less food they needed.
And so, as the winters got longer and colder, the bee-colonies increased,
until at last, from force of habit, they took to keeping together all the
year round. So you see, like as not, ’tis experience as has brought ’em
to build their cities of to-day, just as experience, or the One ye never
mention, has put the same thing into the hearts o’ men.”
A sudden flaw of wind struck the little cottage with a sound like
thunder, and made the cut-glass lustres on the mantle tinkle and glitter
in the yellow candle-glow. The old bee-man stopped, with his pipe
half-way to his mouth, nodded gravely towards the window, in a kind of
obeisance to the elements, and then resumed his theme.
“But there’s a many things about bees,” he said, “that no man ’ull come
to the rights of, until all airthly things is made clear in the Day o’
Days. The great trouble and hindrance to bee-keeping is the swarm, and a
good bee-master nowadays tries all he can to circumvent it. But the old
habit comes back again and again, and often with stocks of bees that
haven’t had a fit o’ it for years. Now, did ye ever think what swarming
must have been in the beginning?”
He suddenly levelled the pipe-stem straight at my head.
“Well, ’tis all speckilation, but here’s my idee o’ it, for what ’tis
worth. Take the wapses: they’re thousands of years behind the honey-bee
in development, and so they give ye a look, so to speak, into the past.
The end of a wapse-colony comes when the females are ready in November;
and hundreds of them go off to hide for the winter, each in some hole or
crevice, until, in the warm spring days, each comes out to start a new
and separate home. Well, perhaps the honey-bees did much the same thing
long ago, when they were all mother-bees, in the time when the world was
young. And perhaps the swarm-fever in a hive to-day is naught but a kind
o’ memory of this, still working, though its main use is gone. The books
here will tell ye o’ many other things brought about by swarming, right
an’ good enough with the old-fashioned hives. Yet that gainsays nothing.
Nature allers works double an’ treble handed in all her dealings. Her
every stroke tells far and wide, like the thousand ripples you make when
you pitch a stone in a pond.”