790 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



December, 1919 



c 



Grace Allen 



LJ 



SUCH an in- 

 teresting 

 sideliner I 

 have just met! 

 Yet perhaps that 

 isn't quite accu- 

 rate, either, foi- 

 really I first be- 

 came acquainted 

 with him several 

 years ago, but somehow didn't become 

 aware of his sideline beekeeping activities 

 until last week. At the outset, moreover, 

 let me frankly admit the rather considerable 

 meagerness of my present information. But 

 he himself is so very interesting, so down- 

 right charming and lovable, that I cannot 

 resist sharing him with all other sideliners. 

 And such a delightful background! in 

 fact, you can't separate him from his back- 

 ground. It is a part of him. Whoever 

 knows one knows the other. In the same 

 quiet old village where his grandfather was 

 vicar and lived and died, he himself, Gilbert 

 White, was born in 1720; and there, except 

 for a few young years during which he ob- 

 tained his degree at Oxford (like his grand- 

 father before him), and became a Fellow 

 and then a Junior Proctor, he lived until his 

 death in 1793. 



Great things were happening during those 

 years — even as in these; England lost the 

 American colonies and gained India and 

 Canada. But Gilbert White lived peacefully 

 on in his tiny bird-haunted village, "more 

 interested in the fate of his tortoise Timothy 

 and the coming of his swallows, than in the 

 struggles of European nations." 



About 50 miles southwest of London, in 

 the far eastern corner of the county of 

 Hampshire, the parish of Selborne lies, with 

 a "vast hill of chalk" and a sheep down 

 and a high wood and, at the foot of the 

 hill, "one single straggling street in a shel- 

 tered vale." This street and its houses is 

 the village of Selborne. A parish of "stiff 

 clays" it is and "warm crumbling moulds," 

 of " broad-leaved elms or "wych hazels," 

 lovely beech trees, ancient yews, and vast 

 and venerable oaks; of "infamous roads" 

 and deep wells of "fine limpid water," 

 which unhappily does not ' ' lather well with 

 5oap!" 



Near the church in the center of the vil- 

 lage, in the days of Gilbert White, was an 

 ancient oak with "huge horizontal arms," 

 and around it were built "stone steps and 

 seats above them" where on summer even- 

 ings old people ' ' sat in grave debate ' ' while 

 the young people "frolicked and danced 

 before them." (Oh, the eternal joy of 

 youth in every generation and every land!) 

 The monotony of winter in the isolated vil- 

 lage was occasionally broken by weekly con- 

 certs — fiddles, flutes, hautboys, bassoons — 

 "to the great annoyance of the neighboring 

 pigs." "We abound with poor," wrote 

 Gilbert White to a friend, "many of whom 

 are sober and industrious, and live comforta- 

 bly in stone or brick cottages. * * * * 



Beekeeping as a Side Line 



^ 



The inhabitants 

 enjoy a good 

 share of health 

 and longevity; 

 and the parish 

 swarms with 

 children." 



There it was 

 that the gentle 

 naturalist lived 

 so long and so quietly. No one noticed 

 him much. He never married; so when oc- 

 casionally he was without a housekeeper, he 

 had ' ' nobody to make whipped syllabubs. ' ' 

 His days were spent in making observations 

 (instead of syllabubs); taking down count- 

 less notes about all natural objects, birds, 

 trees, reptiles, gypsies, cobwebs, rocks, 

 storms; compiling lists of Birds of Summer 

 Passage and Birds of Winter Passage, and 

 writing his now famous letters on ' ' The 

 Natural History of Selborne," letters filled 

 with such grace and indescribable charm 

 that, like Walton 's ' ' Compleat Angler, ' ' 

 they are now literature — and deathless. 



After he had gone, and had been laid to 

 rest by his grandfather near the old church 

 by the still older yew tree, his fame began 

 to spread. Admirers came visiting the lit- 

 tle village he had immortalized, or, as we 

 say today, that he had "put on the m.ap;" 

 but no one remembered much about him. One 

 old woman, who was only a child of eleven 

 when he died, remembered that "he was a 

 quiet old gentleman with very old-fashioned 

 sayings — very kind in giving presents to the 

 poor;" while another villager said of him 

 only that ' ' he was thought very little of till 

 he was dead and gone, and then he was 

 thought a great deal of." 



Only by the exercise of the sternest self- 

 control, strengthened by a wholesome re- 

 spect for the Editor, can I refrain from 

 copying extract after extract from this old 

 Natural History, written with the definite 

 directness of the scientist, the ease and 

 learning of the Oxford scholar and the 

 quaint formal style of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury; and revealing thru every line the gen- 

 tle, rich, intensely interesting (because in- 

 tensely interested) personality of the man. 

 But here is one letter entire, tho by no 

 means the most interesting, except for its 

 apiarian squint. 



* ' To The Honorable Daines Barrington. 



"Selborne, December 12, 1775. 

 "Dear Sir: — We had in this village more 

 than twenty years ago an idiot-boy, whom 

 I well remember, who, from a child, showed 

 a strong propensity to bees; they were his 

 food, his amusement, his sole object. And 

 as people of this cast have seldom more than 

 one point of view^ so this lad exerted all his 

 few faculties on this one pursuit. In the 

 winter he dozed away his time, within his 

 father 's house, by the fireside, in a kind 

 of torpid state, seldom departing from the 

 chimney corner; but in the summer he was 

 all alert, and in quest of his game in the 



