The Bee-Master of Warrilow. 



to leave the honey. Yet bee-driving, 'tis the simplest thing 

 in the world, as every village lad knovi^s to-day. ' ' 



We strolled out amongst the hives, and the bee-master 

 began his leisurely morning round of inspection. In the 

 bee-camp, life and vi?ork alike took their time from the slow 

 march of the summer sun, deliberate, imperturbable, across 

 the pathless heaven. The bees alone keep up the heat and 

 burden of the day. While they were charging in and out 

 of the hives, possessed with a perfect fury of labour, the 

 long hours of sunshine went by for us in immemorial calm. 

 Like the steady rise and fall of a windless tide, darkness and 

 day succeeded one another; and the morning splash in the 

 dew-pond on the top of the hill, and the song by the camp- 

 fire at night, seemed divided only by a dim formless span 

 too uneventful and happy to be called by the old portentous 

 name of Time. 



And yet every moment had its business, not to be de- 

 layed beyond its imminent season. Down in the bee-farm 

 the work of hojjey-harvesting always carried with it a 

 certain stress and bustle. The great centrifugal extractor 

 would be roaring half the night through, emptying the 

 super-combs, which were to be put back into the hives on 

 the morrow, and refilled by the bees. But here, on the 

 moors, modern bee-science is powerless to hurry the work 

 of the sunshine. The thick heather-honey defies the ex- 

 tracting-machine, and cannot be separated without destroy- 

 ing the comb. Moorland honey — except where the wild 

 sage is plentiful enough to thin down the heather sweets — 

 must be left in the virgin comb; and the beeman can do 

 little more than look on as vigilantly as may be at the 

 work of his singing battalions, and keep the storage-space 

 of the hives always well in advance of their need. 



Yet there is one danger — contingent at all seasons of 

 bee-life, but doubly to be guarded against during the criti- 

 cal time of the honey-flow. 



As we loitered round the great circle, the old bee-keeper 

 halted in the rear of every hive to watch the contending 

 streams of workers, the one rippling out into the blue air 

 and sunshine, the other setting more steadily homeward, 

 each bee weighed down with her load of nectar and pale 

 grey pollen, as she scrambled desperately through the 

 opposing- crowd and vanished into the seething darkness 



