INTRODUCTION. 



Among the beautiful things of the countryside which 

 are slowly but surely passing away must be reckoned the 

 old Bee Gardens — fragrant, sunny nooks of blossom, 

 where the bees are housed only in the ancient straw- 

 skeps, and have their own way in everything, the work of 

 the bee-keeper being little more than a placid looking-on at 

 events of which it would have been heresy to doubt the 

 finite perfection. 



To say, however, that modern ideas of progress in bee- 

 farming must inevitably rob the pursuit of all its old- 

 world poetry and picturesqueness would be to represent 

 the case in an unnecessarily bad light. The latter-day bee- 

 hive, it is true, has little more aesthetic value than a 

 Brighton bathing-machine ; and the new class of bee- 

 keepers, which is springing up all over the country, is 

 composed mainly of people who have taken to the calling 

 as they would to any other lucrative business, having, for 

 the most part, nothing but a good-humoured contempt 

 alike for the old-fashioned bee-keeper and the ancient tradi- 

 tions and superstitions of his craft. 



Nor can the inveterate, old-time skeppist himself — the 

 man who obstinately shuts his eyes to all that is good and 

 true in modern bee-science — be counted on to help in the 

 preservation of the beautiful old gardens, or in keeping 

 alive customs which have been handed down from genera- 

 tion to generation, almost unaltered, for literally thou- 

 sands of years. Here and there, in the remoter parts of 

 the country, men can still be found who keep their bees 

 much in the same way as bees were kept in the time of 

 Columella or Virgil ; and are content with as little profit. 

 But these form a rapidly diminishing class. The advan- 

 tages of modern methods are too overwhelmingly apparent. 

 The old school must choose between the adoption of latter- 



