The Bee- Master of Warrilow. 



barrows went to and fro groaning under their burdens; and 

 the earliest bees, roused from their rest by this unwonted 

 turmoil, filled the grey dusk with their high timorous note. 



The bee-master came over to me in his white overalls, a 

 weird apparition in the half-darkness. 



" Tis the honey-dew," he said, out of breath, as he 

 passed by. '* The first cold night of summer brings it out 

 thick on every oak-leaf for miles around; and if we don't 

 get the supers off before the bees can gather it, the honey 

 will be blackened and spoiled for market." 



He carried a curious bundle with him, an armful of 

 fluttering pieces of calico, and I followed him as he went to 

 work on a fresh row of hives. From each bee-dwelling the 

 roof was thrown off, the inner coverings removed, and one 

 of the squares of cloth — damped with the carbolic solution 

 — quickly drawn over the topmost rack. A sudden fearsome 

 buzzing uprose within, and then a sudden silence. There 

 is nothing in the world a bee dreads more than the smell of 

 carbohc acid. In a few^ seconds the super-racks were de- 

 serted, the bees crowding down into the lowest depths of 

 the hives. The creaking barrows w^ent down the long row 

 in the track of the master, taking up the heavy racks as 

 they passed. Before the sun was well up over the hill- 

 brow the last load had been safely gathered in, and the 

 chosen hives were being piled into the waggons, ready for 

 the long day's journey to the moors. 



All this was but a week ago; yet it might have been a 

 week of years, so completely had these rose-red highland 

 solitudes accepted our invasion, and absorbed us into their 

 daily round of sun and song. Here, in a green hollow of 

 velvet turf, right in the heart of the wilderness, the camp 

 had been pitched — the white bell-tents with their skirts 

 drawn up, showing the spindle-legged field-bedsteads 

 within; the filling-house, made of lath and gauze, where 

 the racks could be emptied and recharged with the little 

 white wood section-boxes, safe from marauding bees ; the 

 honey-store, with its bee-proof crates steadily mounting 

 one upon the other, laden with rich brown heather-honey — 

 the finest sweet-food in the world. And round the camp, 

 in a vast spreading circle, stood the hives — a hundred or 

 more — knee-deep in the rosy thicket, each facing outward, 

 and each a whirling vortex of life from early dawn to the 



45 



