BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE 273 
People generally have got out of the habit of eat- 
ing honey because it is so seldom on sale in the 
shops; but if you steadily and continuously remind 
them of it, they will buy, and soon grow to wonder 
how they did without it for so long. But it must 
be set before them in an attractive way. Run- 
honey must be bright and pure to look at, and 
neatly bottled and labelled. If you sell honey in 
the comb, the section-boxes must be spotlessly 
clean and white. In that old book that first led 
me to bee-keeping, it says that only the English 
bee should be kept, because it is a better honey- 
gatherer. But, from the salesman’s point of view, 
there is a much more weighty reason for abjuring 
all foreign strains of bees. English bees leave a 
thin film of air between the honey and the cell- 
cappings, and the result is that the comb always 
looks perfectly white. But nearly all foreigners 
fill their cells to the brim, and this means that the 
finest honeycomb will have a dark and dirty 
appearance, and no one will be tempted to buy. 
That is the sort of thing a business-man thinks of 
first, so the old training days in London have not 
been altogether without their use even here.” 
“The song, aloof and desultory, that I had heard 
from the garden-gate, was growing clearer as we 
walked ; and now we turned the house-corner, and 
came upon more hives, with a neat, girlish figure - 
busy among them ; and, hard by, a tiny laundry- 
shed, wherein I caught a glimpse of brown arms 
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