CHAPTER XIV. 
CONCERNING HONEY 
“THE bee-keepers in English villages to-day are 
all familiar—too familiar at times—with the 
holiday-making stranger at the garden gate inquiring 
for honey. Somehow or other the demand for this 
old natural sweet-food appears to have greatly 
increased of recent years among wandering towns- 
folk in the country. A competent bee-master, 
dealing with a large number of combs, will not 
mingle them indiscriminately, but will unerringly 
assort them, so that he will have perhaps at the end 
of the season almost as many kinds of honey in store 
as there are fields on his countryside. I speak, of 
course, not of the large bee-farmer—who, em- 
ploying of necessity wholesale methods, can aim 
only at a good all-round commercial sample of no 
finely distinctive colour or flavour—but of the con- 
noisseur in bee-craft, the gourmet among the hives, 
who knows that there are as many varieties in 
honey as there are in wine, and would as little dream 
of confusing them. 
Honey lovers who have been eating wax all their 
days will be as hardly dissuaded from the practice 
as he whose custom it may be to consume the paper 
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