A Bee-Man of the 'Forties. 



years old. Nowadays remorseless science has proved that 

 the individual life of the honey-bee extends to four or five 

 months at most ; but the old bee-keeper firmly believed that 

 some at least of the original members of this colony still 

 flourished in green old age deep in the sombre corridors of 

 -the ancrent sfvcp. Bending down, he would point out to 

 yd^ among, Jhe^ci>owd on the alighting-board, certain bees 

 with polished thorax and ragged wings worn almost to a 

 stumn. While the young worker-bees were charging in 

 and out of the hive at breakneck speed, these super- 

 annuated amazons doddered about in the sunlight, with an 

 obvious and pathetic assumption of importance. They 

 were really the last survivors of the bygone winter's brood. 

 Their task of hatching the new spring generation was 

 over ; and now, the power of flight denied to them, they 

 busied themselves in the work of sentinels at the gate, or 

 in grooming the young bees as they came out for their first 

 adventure into the far world of blossoming clover under 

 the hill. 



For modern apiculture, with its interchangeable comb- 

 frames and section-supers, and American notions generally, 

 the old bee-keeper harboured a fine contempt. In its place 

 he had an exhaustless store of original bee-knowledge, 

 gathered throughout his sixty odd years of placid life 

 among the bees. His were all old-fashioned hives of 

 straw, hackled and potsherded just as they must have been 

 any time since Saxon Alfred burned the cakes. Each bee- 

 colony had its separate three-legged stool, and each leg 

 stood in an earthen pan of water, impassable moat for 

 ants and " wood-li's," and such small honey-thieves. 

 Why the hives were thus dotted about In such admiired but 

 inconvenient disorder was a puzzle at first, until you learned 

 more of ancient bee-traditions. Wherever a swarm 

 settled — up in the pink-rosetted apple-boughs, under the 

 eaves of the old thatched cottage, or deep in the tangle of 

 the hawthorn hedge — there, on the nearest open grouad 

 beneath, w^as its inalienable, predetermined home. When, 

 as sometimes happened, the swarm went straight away out 

 of sight over the meadows, or sailed off like a pirouetting 

 grey cloud over the roof of the wood, the old bee-keeper 

 never soug-ht to reclaim it for the garden. 



** 'Tis gone to the shires fer change o' air," he would 



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