Instincts and Habits of Bees. 95 



entirely gone, the groves of lime are thinned and their sites 

 marked out for houses, and in place of clover fields and florists' 

 grounds, rich in stores of honey, there are myriads of villas 

 rising on every hand, and, with me at least, bee-keeping is 

 becoming a purely metropolitan undertaking. Yet I see no 

 falling off in the industry of my busy friends, no diminution 

 of the harvest, no deterioration of the quality of the honey. 

 The box of snow-white virgin honey which I exhibited five 

 years ago at a meeting of the Apiarian Society in Bedford Row, 

 can be matched with combs now in use from last year's har- 

 vest, and as I sit beside the hives, the bees come in laden with 

 golden and russet pollen as bright and plentiful as of yore, but 

 where and how they obtain their supplies is a mystery which 

 defies explanation. I suppose, in order to look wise about the 

 matter, it must be said that bees can travel three or four miles, 

 and that the open country still lies before them with its wealth 

 of honied spoils ; and so long as London does not cover the 

 whole county of Middlesex, the bees will find their pasture, and 

 treat with proper contempt the invasion of the meadows by 

 the speculative builders. But the growth of the town does 

 make its mark in the annals of the hive. When I first took up 

 my abode at Stoke Newington, we used to shut out London by 

 slamming the front gate ; all beyond was a region of meadows 

 and gardens, rising in successive swells to Muswell Hill, which 

 bounded our prospect from the topmost windows. Now the 

 view is intercepted on every hand, the enormous mass of 

 houses known as Highbury New Park, the newer village known 

 as Woodbury Down, and last and worst of all, the rurality of 

 Lordship Road is extinguished, and new bricks glare upon the 

 eye where mighty elms and pines waved their green banners 

 against the blue sky, and furnished villages for mellifluous 

 nightingales and clamorous rooks. I have read all this in 

 the character of the honey produced here, for under certain 

 conditions the produce is dark-coloured, and when the honey 

 is run off from the comb there is deposited by it a black sedi- 

 ment which is real soot ; yes, vulgar soot. When I say that 

 last year's honey was as white as the sample which elicited 

 such unanimous and enthusiastic admiration five years ago, I 

 must add that such honey is only to be obtained by preventing 

 swarming and putting on the honey-boxes at the latter end of 

 May. Then the boxes are filled quickly at a time when few 

 fires are burning, and the result is a product equal to the best 

 obtainable in good bee districts in the country. If they are 

 capped early, and the caps, through the stocks being weak or 

 the weather being cold, are a long time filling, the comb is 

 dark, and we are obliged to confess that it is London honey, 

 and, like all London productions, sooty. 



