IN A BEE-CAMP 69 
originally they must have been each about ten 
inches broad by as many deep. 
““ These,’’ said the bee-master, with a shamefaced 
air of confession, ‘‘ were the sulphur-pits. I dug 
them the first year I ever brought hives to the 
heather; and here, for twenty seasons or more, 
some of the finest and strongest stocks in Sussex 
were regularly done to death. ’Tis a drab tale to 
tell, but we knew no better then. To get the honey 
away from the bees looked well-nigh impossible 
with thousands of them clinging all over the combs. 
And it never occurred to any of us to try the other 
way, and get the bees to leave the honey. Yet bee- 
driving, ’tis the simplest thing in the world, as 
every village lad knows 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 work 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 
delayed beyond its imminent season. Down in the 
bee-farm the work of honey-harvesting always 
