104 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
When the summer night has shut down warm 
and still over the red dusk of evening, and the last 
airy loiterer is safely home from the fields, a 
curious change comes to the bee-garden. The old 
analogy between a concourse of hives and a human 
city is, at this season, utterly at fault. Silence and 
rest after the day’s work may be the portion of the 
larger community, but in the time of the great honey- 
flow there is neither rest nor slumber for the bees. 
A fury of labour possesses them, one and all; and 
darkness does not remit, but merely transposes the 
scene of, their activity. Coming out into the garden 
at this hour for a quiet pipe among the hives—an 
old and favourite habit with most bee-keeping 
veterans—the new spirit abroad is at once manifest. 
The sulky, fragrant darkness is silent, quiet with 
the influence of the starshine overhead; but the very 
earth of the footway seems to vibrate with the 
imprisoned energy of the hives. This is the time 
when the low, rustling roar of wing-music can best 
be heard, and one of the most wonderful phases of 
bee-life studied. The problem of the ventilation of 
human hives is attacked commonly on one main 
principle—unstinted ingress for fresh air and a like 
abundant means of outward passage for the bad. 
But, if the bees are to be credited, modern sanitary 
scientists are trimming altogether on the wrong 
tack. A colony of bees will allow one aperture, 
and one alone, in the hive, to serve all and every 
purpose. If the enterprising novice in beemanship 
gimlets a row of ventilation-holes in the back of his 
hive—an idea that occurs to most tyros in apicul- 
ture—the bees will infallibly seal them all up again 
before morning. They work on entirely different 
