Bee-Culture at Present 387 



ing has been introduced — strange to say — from America, 

 tlie transportation is yet more unique. Five brothers there 

 owned 350 stocks of bees that yielded them 26,000 

 pounds of honey during the season of 1885. "Some 

 12,000 pounds of this were furnished in April by the orange 

 groves at Jaffa, and the wild thyme on the hills about 

 Bethlehem gave the remainder, during July. The trans- 

 portation of the stocks is effected at night on the backs of 

 camels, sixteen in a load. Attendants and camels rest 

 during the day while the bees fly, and when night 

 approaches ' they fold their tents like the Arabs and silently 

 steal away.' What a sight to see more than twenty of 

 these ships of the desert, with their Hving burdens, filing 

 over the Judean hills ! Natives and foreigners in the Holy 

 Land have made big eyes over the new business which has 

 come from over the ocean — even from young America." 



One should think they might ! In Germany bees are 

 taken to the blooming rape fields, and the people of La 

 Beauce, France, take their hives every August in carts to a 

 distance of about ten miles, where they find heath or buck- 

 wheat in flower, the sainfoin and vetches of their own 

 district yielding no further supplies. The people call this 

 transporting of the bees " leading them to pasture." 



They travel by night at a slow pace over the easiest roads 

 they can find, each cart containing thirty or forty hives. 



They remain about two months in a place of pasturage 

 in little villages containing sometimes as many as three 

 thousand hives. 



Sometimes the hives are moved several times in a 

 season, going from one place to another, where certain 

 flowers bloom abundantly at different seasons. 



In Scotland the bees are carried in carts to the Highlands, 

 to gather honey from the heather when the nectar of the 

 Lowlands has been exhausted, 



