HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW
THERE never comes, in early April, that first bright hot day which means
the beginning of outdoor work on the bee-farm, but I fall to thinking of
old times with a great longing to have them back again.
Modern beemanship, at least to the wide-awake folk in the craft, brings
in gold pieces now where formerly one had much ado to make shillings.
But profit cannot always be reckoned in money. The old mysteries and the
old delusions were a sort of capital that paid cent per cent if you only
humoured them aright. Bee-men, who flourished when there was a young
queen upon the throne, wore their ignorance as the parson his silk and
lawn. It was something that set them apart and above their neighbours.
All that the bees did was put to their credit, just for the trouble of a
wise wag of the head and a little timely reticence. The organ-blower
worked in full view of the congregation, while the player sat invisibly
within, so the blower, after the common trend of earthly affairs, got all
the glory for the tune.
There are no mysteries now in honey-craft. Science has dragooned the
fairies out of sight and hearing as a man treads out sparks in the whin.
But, though the mysteries have gone, the old music of the hives is still
here as sweet as ever. This morning, when the sun was but an hour over
the hilltop, I rose from my bed, and, coming down the creaking stair
through the silence and half-darkness, threw the heavy old house-door
back. At once the level sunshine and the song of bees and birds came
pouring in together. There was the loud humming of bees in the leafing
honeysuckle of the porch, and the soft low note of the hives beyond. In
its plan to-day Warrilow Bee-farm reveals the whole story of its growth
from times long gone to the present. All the hives near the cottage are
old-fashioned skeps of straw, covered in with three sticks and a hackle.
A little way down the slope the ancient bee-boxes begin, eight-sided
Stewartons mostly, with the green veneer of decades upon some of them.
Beyond these stand the first rack-frame hives that ever came to Warrilow;
and thence, stretching away down the sunny hillside in long trim rows,
are the modern frame-bar hives, spick and span in their new Joseph’s
coats of paint, with the gillyflowers driving golden shafts between them,
until they reach the line of sheds—comb and honey-stores,
extracting-house, and workshops—marking the distant lane-side.
_The Water-carriers_
As I stood in the doorway, caught by the mesmeric sheen of the light and
the beauty of the morning, the humming of the bees overhead grew louder
and louder. There were no flowers as yet to attract them, but in early
April the dense canopy of honeysuckle here is always besieged with bees,
directly the sun has warmed the clinging dewdrops. These were the
water-carriers from the hives. Water at this time is one of the main
necessities of bee-life. With it the workers are able to reduce the
thick honey and the dry pollen to the right consistency for consumption,
and can then generate the bee-milk with which the young larvæ are fed.
Later on in the day the water-fetchers will crowd in hundreds to the oozy
pond-side down in the valley—every bee-garden has its ancestral
drinking-place invariably resorted to year after year. But thus early
the pond-water is too cold for safe transport by so chilly a mortal as
the little worker-bee; so Nature warms a temporary supply for her here
where the dew trembles like drops of molten rainbow at the tip of each
woodbine leaf.
I drank myself a deep draught from the well that goes down a sheer sixty
feet into the virgin chalk of the hillside, and fell to loitering through
the garden ways. Though it was so early, the little oil-engine down
below in the hive-making shed was already coughing shrilly through its
vent-pipe, and the saw thrumming. Here and there among the hives my men
stooped at their work. The pony was harnessing to the cart, and would
soon be plodding the three-mile-long road to the station with the day’s
deliveries of honey. By all laws of duty I should be down there, taking
my row of hives with the rest—master and men side by side like a string
of turnip-hoers—busy at the spring examination which, as all bee-men
know, is the most important work of the year. But the very thought of
opening hives, now in the first warm break of April weather or at any
time, filled me with a strange loathing. So it never used to be, never
could be, in the old days whose memory always comes flooding back to me
at this season with such a clear call and such a hindrance to progress
and duty. Then I had as little dreamed of opening a hive as opening a
vein. I should have done no more than I was doing now—passing from one
old straw skep to another through the sweet vernal sunshine, my boots
scattering the dew from the grass as I went, and looking for signs that
tell the bee-man nearly all he really needs to know. I shut my ears to
the throaty song of the engine. I heard the cart drive away without a
thought of scanning its load. I got me down in a little nook of red
currant flowers under the wall, where the old straw hives were thickest,
and gave myself up to idle dreams, dreams of the bees and bee-men of long
ago.
I should be splitting elder, thought I; splitting the long, straight
wands to make feeding-troughs. I called to mind doing it, here on this
self-same bench near upon fifty years ago, with my father, the woodman,
sitting at my elbow learning me. We split the wands clean and true,
scooped out the pith from each half, and dammed up its ends with clay.
Then, with a handful of these crescent troughs and a can of syrup, we
went the round of the garden together looking for stocks that were short
of stores. When we found one, we pushed the hollow slip of elder gently
into the hive-entrance as far as it would go, and filled it with syrup,
filling it again and again throughout the day as the bees within drank it
dry.
_The Old Style and the New_
A queer figure my father cut in his short grey smock and his long lean
bent legs encased in leathern gaiters, legs between which, when I was
little, and trotting after him, I had always a fine view of the sky. He
was never at fault in his estimate of a hive’s prosperity. The rich
clear song and steady traffic of a well-to-do bee-nation he knew at once
from the anxious note and frantic coming and going of a
starvation-threatened hive. It was the tune that told him. Nowadays we
just rip the coverings from a hive and, lifting the combs out one by one,
judge by sheer brute-force of eyesight whether there be need or plenty.
“One-thirty-two!”—from my sunny seat under the pink currant blossom I can
hear the call of the foreman to the booking ’prentice down in the
bee-farm—“One-thirty-two—six frames covered—no moth—medium light—brood
over three—mark R.Q.” R.Q. means that the stock is to be re-queened at
the earliest opportunity. She has been a famous queen in her
time—One-thirty-two. This would have been her fourth year, had she kept
up her fertility. But “brood over three”—that is to say, only three
combs with young bees maturing in them—is not good enough for
progressive, up-to-date Warrilow in April, and she must be pinched at
last. In the common course, I never let a queen remain at the head of
affairs after her second season. Nine out of ten of them break down
under the wear and stress of two summers, and fall to useless
drone-breeding in the third.
Already the sun has climbed high, and yet I linger, though I know I
should be gone an hour ago. The darkness, far away as it seems, will not
find all done that should be done on the bee-farm, toil as hard as we
may. For these sudden hot days in spring often come singly, and every
moment of them is precious. To-morrow the north wind may be keening
under an iron-grey sky, and pallid wreaths of snow-flakes weighing down
the almond-blossom. So it happened only a year ago, when on the
twenty-fifth of April I must clear away the snow from the entrance-boards
of the hives. It is, I think, the unending round of business—the itch
that is on us now of finding a day’s work for every day in the year in
modern beecraft—which has had most to do with the changed times. The old
leisure, as well as the old colour and mystery, has gone out of
bee-keeping. Between burning-time in August and swarming-time in May
there used to be little else for the bee-master to do but smoke his pipe
and ruminate and watch the wax flowing into the hives. For we all
believed that the little pellets of many-tinted pollen which the bees
constantly carry in on their thighs were not food for the grubs in the
cells, but wax for the comb-building. I could believe it now, indeed, if
I might only sit here long enough; but the busy voices are calling,
calling, and I must be gone.