GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



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Beekeeping as a Side Line 



Grace Allen 



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LAST month 

 , w h e n you 

 read Vergil's 

 account of t he 

 ' ' memorable art 

 derived from an 

 Arcadian king," 

 showing how to 

 re-stock your 

 beeyard "if thy 



whole swarm at a stroke should fail, with 

 no stock left for breeding," and the story 

 of the wild bees feeding the infant Jupiter, 

 and the other story of the beekeeping shep- 

 herd, did you smile, dear Sideline friends? 

 Probably you did. But I know you smiled 

 in gentle kindly wise, as at the imaginings 

 of your own wondering wide-eyed children 

 as they spin their baby tales. For it is 

 from the childhood of the world that the 

 singers of songs and the tellers of tales 

 have handed down to us these dim old leg- 

 ends, some of them so strangely foolish, 

 some of them so strangely wise, and nearly 

 all of them strangely beautiful, with a 

 deathless constraining beauty that men will 

 always fold against their hearts — and love. 

 "Gleanings is being published in 1922." 

 So a certain irate gentleman recently wrote 

 me, in delicate expostulation against my 

 enthusiasm for the antique bee lore of the 

 old Eoman poet of the Fourth Georgic, and 

 my stories of the long-ago legendary past, 

 when the childlike people of the young 

 world — God's kindergarten — dreaming their 

 dreams, spun deathless stories of nymphs 

 and dryads and gods. It was long before 

 cool-searching Science had learned so much 

 and taught so much, that man's everlasting 

 questioning as to the why and Jiow of things 

 around him found its earliest answers in 

 the poetry of his own heart, flowering into 

 lovely song and story, till the hours and 

 the seasons and the dawns became living 

 things, the sun was a god-driven chariot of 

 flame, 'and every flower, every tree, every 

 brook, whispering to its bending grasses, 

 and all the sun-swept long sea-breakers 

 held some divine life hid within. It was 

 long before the heart of the world had been 

 hardened in the commercialism that Words- 

 worth cried out so sharply against, with his 



"The world is too much with us; late or soon, 

 Getting or spending, we lay waste our powers" 



that the men of ancient Greece and Eome, 

 though "suckled in a creed (now) out- 

 worn," sensitive to pulsing beauty and re- 

 sponsive to the call of the earth and the 

 moon and the ungathered winds, cared earn- 

 estly that they might 



"Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea 

 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 



It was long before a deepening human ma- 

 turity had made more spiritual the grow- 

 ing conception of the great Divine Eeality, 

 at whose feet all lesser gods are laid away, 

 that men saw in every happening of every 

 (lay and in every aspect of nature the foot- 



1 



%J 



April, 1922 



print of some god, 

 and goat-footed 

 Pan crashed 

 through the lilies 

 of the river for 

 a reed through 

 which to blow 

 the magic music 

 that still rings in 

 men's hearts. 

 "Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Paul 

 Piercing sweet by the river I 

 Blinding sweet, great God Panl" 



It was long before a holy figure had walked 

 the Galilean hills, long before a quiet voice 

 had said "Our Father," that the beauty- 

 loving people — out of their amazement and 

 their humility and their awe — created so 

 many gods, saw so many ' ' sudden faces 

 strike a glory through the mist. ' ' 



Plutarch tells of an old tradition that 

 when the cross was reared on Calvary all 

 the ancient oracles ceased, and out at sea 

 astonished sailors heard across troubled 

 waves the sharp cry, "Great Pan is dead!" 

 O you gods of Greece and Eome, "with 

 your purples rent asunder," though you be 

 dead, we love you still. We have laid aside 

 the half-truths of your great beauty for the 

 greater beauty of a greater and ever grow- 

 ing truth, yet, though you be dead, we love 

 you still. 



"By your beauty, which confesses 

 Some Chief Beauty conquering you, — 

 By our grand heroic guesses. 

 Through your falsehood, at the True" — 



we love you still. Though even Pan be 

 dead. (And O — but tell it not to the irate 

 gentleman who lives only in 1922! — some 

 of us have heard strange music "blinding 

 sweet" across the hills, and have wondered 

 if Pan be really dead!) 



But Gleanings, insists the irate and 

 friendly gentleman, is being published 

 in 1922. So, having paid one last wee trib- 

 ute to the "mythic fancies" and the "deb- 

 onnair romances" spun in the youth of the 

 world, and asserting stoutly our precious 

 privilege, even while tramping steadily 

 through the high noon of Today, of stretch- 

 ing one appreciative hand toward the radi- 

 ant sunset of Yesterday (Ah, but it was sun- 

 rise once!), while the other reaches long- 

 ingly toward the dawn of a great dreaming 

 Tomorrow, I come happily back to the pres- 

 ent, and make my bow to the twentieth 

 century. And in so doing I shall let loose 

 on this unsuspecting page a crowding troop 

 of personal pronouns (except for one or two 

 slips, how I held them in leash thru 1921!), 

 and you shall see a veritable riot of those 

 most exultant and friendly of all letters, 

 the gayly irrepressible capital I's! — with 

 their faithful followers, the we's and our's 

 and us 's. 



It happened in 1921. Though perhaps it 

 reached back into 1920. May I g(j back that 

 far? That was when I had my nervous 

 breakdown — a story by itself, really funny 



