IN A BEE-CAMP 67 
of cloth—damped with the carbolic solution—quickly 
drawn over the topmost rack. A sudden fearsome 
buzzing uprose within, and then a sudden silence. 
There is nothing in the world a bee dreads more 
than the smell of carbolic acid. In a few seconds 
the super-racks were deserted, the bees crowding 
down into the lowest depths of the hives. The 
creaking barrows went down the long row in the 
track of the master, taking up the heavy racks as 
they passed. Before the sun was well up over the 
hill-brow the last load had been safely gathered in, 
and the chosen hives were being piled into the 
waggons, ready for the long day’s journey to the 
moors. 
All this was but a week ago; yet it might have 
been a week of years, so completely had these rose- 
red highland solitudes accepted our invasion, and 
absorbed us into their daily round of sun and song. 
Here, in a green hollow of velvet turf, right in the 
heart of the wilderness, the camp had been pitched— 
the white bell-tents with their skirts drawn up, 
showing the spindle-legged field-bedsteads within; 
the filling-house, made of lath and gauze, where the 
racks could be emptied and recharged with the little 
white wood section-boxes, safe from marauding 
bees; the honey-store, with its bee-proof crates 
steadily mounting one upon the other, laden with 
rich brown heather-honey—the finest sweet-food in 
the world. And round the camp, in a vast spread- 
ing circle, stood the hives—a hundred or more— 
knee-deep in the rosy thicket, each facing outward, 
and each a whirling vortex of life from early dawn 
to the last amber gleam of sunset abiding under the 
flinching silver of the stars, 
