WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 225 



farms are each surrounded with their compact 

 acreage of blossoming sheep-feed, and there is 

 nothing but empty miles of close-cropped turf 

 between, these bee-roads in the air can be 

 easily found and studied. Walking over the 

 springy, undulating grass in the quiet of a summer's 

 morning, a faint, far-off note breaks suddenly upon 

 you like the twang of a harp-string high up in 

 the blue. A step or two onward and you lose 

 it ; retracing your path, it peals out again. You 

 can see nothing, strain your eyes as you will ; but 

 its cause is evident, and with a little trying you 

 can presently make out the main direction of the 

 flight, and see down in the hollow far below, the 

 huddled roofs of a farmstead with a patchwork of 

 fields about it, white with clover, or rose-red with 

 sainfoin in fullest bloom. 



Perhaps there is no honey in the world so fine 

 as that to be obtained from these solitary Down- 

 land settlements. With the ordinary consumer 

 honey is merely honey, and there is an end of the 

 matter. But the beeman knows that the quality 

 of honey varies as greatly as that of wine. He 

 will tell you at first taste the crop from which it is 

 gathered, whether it has one source or many, 

 whether it is all flower-essence, or has been con- 

 taminated by the hateful honeydew, which is not 

 honey at all. Down in the lowlands, except at 

 certain rare seasons when only one crop is in 

 flower, it is next to impossible to get honey abso- 



15 



