46 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
over; and now, the power of flight denied to them, 
they busied themselves in the work of sentinels at 
the gate, or in grooming the young bees as they 
came out for their first adventure into the far 
world of blossoming clover under the hill. 
For modern apiculture, with its interchangeable 
comb-frames and section-supers, and American 
notions generally, the old bee-keeper harboured a 
fine contempt. In its place he had an exhaustless 
store of original bee-knowledge, gathered through- 
out his sixty odd years of placid life among the 
bees. His were all old-fashioned hives of straw, 
backled and potsherded just as they must have been 
any time since Saxon Alfred burned the cakes. 
Each bee-colony had its separate three-legged 
stool, and each leg stood in an earthen pan of 
water, impassable moat for ants and ‘‘ wood-li’s,”’ 
and such small honey-thieves. Why the hives were 
thus dotted about in such admired but inconvenient 
disorder was a puzzle at first, until you learned 
more of ancient bee-traditions. Wherever a swarm 
settled—up in the pink-rosetted apple-boughs, 
under the eaves of the old thatched cottage, or 
deep in the tangle of the hawthorn hedge—there, 
on the nearest open ground beneath, was _ its 
inalienable, predetermined home. When, as some- 
times happened, the swarm went straight away out 
of sight over the meadows, or sailed off like a 
pirouetting grey cloud over the roof of the wood, 
the old bee-keeper never sought to reclaim it for 
the garden. 
““’Tis gone to the shires fer change o’ air,’’ he 
would say, shielding his bleak blue eyes with his 
hand, as he gazed after it. ‘“‘’Twould be agen 
