INTRODUCTION 
Yeh the beautiful things of the country- 
side, which are slowly but surely passing 
away, must be reckoned the old Bee Gardens— 
fragrant, sunny nooks of blossom, where the bees 
are housed only in the ancient straw skeps, and have 
their. own way -in everything, the work of the bee- 
keeper being little more than a placid looking-on at 
events of which it would have been heresy to doubt 
the finite perfection. 
To say, however, that modern ideas of progress 
in bee-farming must inevitably rob the pursuit of all 
its old-world poetry and picturesqueness, would be 
to represent the case in an unnecessarily bad light. 
The latter-day beehive, it is true, has little more 
zesthetic value than a Brighton bathing-machine; 
and the new class of bee-keepers, which is spring- 
ing up all over the country, is composed mainly of 
people who have taken to the calling as they would 
to any other lucrative business, having, for the 
most part, nothing but a good-humoured contempt 
alike for the old-fashioned bee-keeper and the 
ancient traditions and superstitions of his craft. 
Nor can the inveterate, old-time skeppist himself 
—the man who obstinately shuts his eyes to all that 
is good and true in modern bee-science—be counted 
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