BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE 372 



People generally have got out of the habit of eat- 

 ing honey because it is so seldom on sale in the 

 shops ; but if you steadily and continuously remind 

 them of it, they will buy, and soon'-grow to wonder 

 how they did without it for so long. But it must 

 be set before them in an attractive way. Run- 

 honey must be bright and pure to look at, and 

 neatly bottled and labelled. If you sell honey in 

 the comb, the section -boxes must be spotlessly 

 clean and white. In that old book that first led 

 me to bee-keeping, it says that only the English 

 bee should be kept, becauge it is a better honey- 

 gatherer. But, from the salesman's point of view, 

 there is a much more weighty reason for abjuring 

 all foreign strains of bees. English bees leave a 

 thin 2 film of air between the honey and the cell- 

 cappings, and the result is that the comb always 

 looks perfectly white. But nearly all foreigners 

 fill their cells to the brim, and this means that the 

 finest honeycomb will have a dark and dirty 

 appearance, and no one will be tempted to buy. 

 That is the sort of thing a business-man thinks of 

 first, so the old training days in London have not 

 been altogether without their use even here." 



The song, aloof and desultory, that I had heard 

 from the garden-gate, was growing clearer as we 

 walked ; and now we turned the house-corner, and 

 came upon more hives, with a neat, girlish figure 

 busy among them ; and, hard by, a tiny laundry- 

 shed, wherein I caught a glimpse of brown arms 

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