1o2 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
in the sunshine, a thronging sustained melody that 
never ceased all through the heat and burthen of 
the glittering summer’s day. 
When Shelley heard the ‘ yellow bees in the ivy- 
bloom,’’ and he of Avonside wrote of “‘ singing 
masons building roofs of gold,’’ probably neither 
thought of the humming of the hive-bee as anything 
more than an ingredient in the general delightful 
country chorus, as distinct from the less-inspiring 
labour-note of busy humanity in a town. With the 
single exception, perhaps, of Wordsworth, poets, 
thinking most of their line, commonly miss the 
subtler phases of wild life, such as the continually 
changing emphasis and capricious variation in bird 
song, the real sound made by growth, or the 
unceasing movement of things conventionally held 
to be inert. And in the same way the endlessly 
varied song of the bees has been epitomised by 
imaginative writers generally into a sound, pleasantly 
arcadian enough, but little more suggestive of life 
and meaning than the hum of telegraph wires in a 
breeze. 
Yet there are few sounds in nature more bewilder- 
ingly complex than this. For every season in the 
year the song of the hives has its own distinct 
appropriate quality, and this, again, is constantly 
influenced by the time of day, and even by the 
momentary aspect of the weather. A bee-keeper of 
the old school—and he is sure to be the ‘‘ character,”’ 
the quaint original of a village—manages his hives 
as much by ear as by sight. The general note of 
each hive reveals to him intuitively its progress and 
condition. He seems to know what to expect on 
almost any day in the year, so that if Rip van Winkle 
