The bee-mistress looked at my card, then put its owner under a like careful scrutiny. In the shady garden where we stood, the sunlight fell in quivering golden splashes round our feet. High overhead, in the purple elm-blossom, the bees and the glad March wind made rival music. Higher still a ripple of lark-song hung in the blue, and a score of rooks were sailing by, filling the morning with their rich, deep clamour of unrest.

The bee-mistress drew off her sting-proof gloves in thoughtful deliberation.

“If I show you the bee-farm,” said she, eyeing me somewhat doubtfully, “and let you see what women have done and are doing in an ideal feminine industry, will you promise to write of us with seriousness? I mean, will you undertake to deal with the matter for what it is—a plain, business enterprise by business people—and not treat it flippantly, just because no masculine creature has had a hand in it?”

“This is an attempt,” she went on—the needful assurances having been given—“an attempt, and, we believe, a real solution to a very real difficulty. There are thousands of educated women in the towns who have to earn their own bread; and they do it usually by trying to compete with men in walks of life for which they are wholly unsuited. Now, why do they not come out into the pure air and quiet of the countryside, and take up any one of several pursuits open there to a refined, well-bred woman? Everywhere the labourers are forsaking the land and crowding into the cities. That is a farmers’ problem, with which, of course, women have nothing to do. The rough, heavy work in the cornfields must always be done either by men or machinery. But there are certain employments, even in the country, that women can invariably undertake better than men, and bee-keeping is one of them. The work is light. It needs just that delicacy and deftness of touch that only a woman can bring to it. It is profitable. Above all, there is nothing about it, from first to last, of an objectionable character, demanding masculine interference. In poultry-farming, good as it is for women, there must always be a stony-hearted man about the place to do unnameable necessary things in a fluffy back-shed. But bee-keeping is clean, clever, humanising, open-air work—essentially women’s work all through.”

She had led the way through the scented old-fashioned garden, towards a gate in the farther wall, talking as she went. Now she paused, with her hand on the latch.

“This,” she said, “we call the Transition Gate. It divides our work from our play. On this side of it we have the tennis-court and the croquet, and other games that women love, young or old. But it is all serious business on the other side. And now you shall see our latter-day Eden, with its one unimportant omission.”

As the door swung back to her touch, the murmur that was upon the air grew suddenly in force and volume. Looking through, I saw an old orchard, spacious, sun-riddled, carpeted with green; and, stretching away under the ancient apple-boughs, long, neat rows of hives, a hundred or more, all alive with bees, winnowing the March sunshine with their myriad wings.

Here and there in the shade-dappled pleasance figures were moving about, busily at work among the hives, figures of women clad in trim holland blouses, and wearing bee-veils, through which only a dim guess at the face beneath could be hazarded. Laughter and talk went to and fro in the sun-steeped quiet of the place; and one of the fair bee-gardeners near at hand—young and pretty, I could have sworn, although her blue gauze veil disclosed provokingly little—was singing to herself, as she stooped over an open hive, and lifted the crowded brood-frames one by one up into the light of day.

“The great work of the year is just beginning with us,” explained the bee-mistress. “In these first warm days of spring every hive must be opened and its condition ascertained. Those that are short of stores must be fed; backward colonies must be quickened to a sense of their responsibilities. Clean hives must be substituted for the old, winter-soiled dwellings. Queens that are past their prime will have to be dethroned, and their places filled by younger and more vigorous successors. But it is all typically women’s work. You have an old acquaintance with the lordly bee-master and his ways; now come and see how a woman manages.”

We passed over to the singing lady in the veil, and—from a safe distance—watched her at her work. Each frame, as it was raised out of the seething abyss of the hive, was turned upside down and carefully examined. A little vortex of bees swung round her head, shrilling vindictively. Those on the uplifted comb-frames hustled to and fro like frightened sheep, or crammed themselves head foremost into the empty cells, out of reach of the disturbing light.

“That is a queenless stock,” said the bee-mistress. “It is going to be united with another colony, where there is a young, high-mettled ruler in want of subjects.”

We watched the bee-gardener as she went to one of the neighbouring hives, subdued and opened it, drew out all the brood-combs, and brought them over in a carrying-rack, with the bees clustering in thousands all about them. Then a scent-diffuser was brought into play, and the fragrance of lavender-water came over to us, as the combs of both hives were quickly sprayed with the perfume, then lowered into the hive, a frame from each stock alternately. It was the old time-honoured plan for uniting bee-colonies, by impregnating them with the same odour, and so inducing the bees to live together peaceably, where otherwise a deadly war might ensue. But the whole operation was carried through with a neat celerity, and light, dexterous handling, I had never seen equalled by any man.

“That girl,” said the bee-mistress, as we moved away, “came to me out of a London office a year ago, anÆmic, pale as the paper she typed on all day for a living. Now she is well and strong, and almost as brown as the bees she works among so willingly. All my girls here have come to me from time to time in the same way out of the towns, forsaking indoor employment that was surely stunting all growth of mind and body. And there are thousands who would do the same to-morrow, if only the chance could be given them.”

We stopped in the centre of the old orchard. Overhead the swelling fruit-buds glistened against the blue sky. Merry thrush-music rang out far and near. Sun and shadow, the song of the bees, laughing voices, a snatch of an old Sussex chantie, the perfume of violet-beds and nodding gillyflowers, all came over to us through the lichened tree-stems, in a flood of delicious colour and scent and sound. The bee-mistress turned to me, triumphantly.

“Would any sane woman,” she asked, “stop in the din and dirt of a smoky city, if she could come and work in a place like this? Bee-keeping for women! do you not see what a chance it opens up to poor toiling folk, pining for fresh air and sunshine, especially to the office-girl class, girls often of birth and refinement—just that kind of poor gentlewomen whose breeding and social station render them most difficult of all to help? And here is work for them, clean, intellectual, profitable; work that will keep them all day long in the open air; a healthy, happy country life, humanly within the reach of all.”

“What is wanted,” continued the bee-mistress, as we went slowly down the broad main-way of the honey-farm, “is for some great lady, rich in business ideas as well as in pocket, to take up the whole scheme, and to start a network of small bee-gardens for women over the whole land. Very large bee-farms are a mistake, I think, except in the most favourable districts. Bees work only within a radius of two or three miles at most, so that the number of hives that can be kept profitably in a given area has its definite limits. But there is still plenty of room everywhere for bee-farms of moderate size, conducted on the right principles; and there is no reason at all why they should not work together on the co-operative plan, sending all their produce to some convenient centre in each district, to be prepared and marketed for the common good.”

“But the whole outcome,” she went on, “of a scheme like this depends on the business qualities imported into it. Here, in the heart of the Sussex Weald, we labour together in the midst of almost ideal surroundings, but we never lose sight of the plain, commercial aspect of the thing. We study all the latest writings on our subject, experiment with all novelties, and keep ourselves well abreast of the times in every way. Our system is to make each hive show a clear, definite profit. The annual income is not, and can never be, a very large one, but we fare quite simply, and have sufficient for our needs. In any case, however, we have proved here that a few women, renting a small house and garden out in the country, can live together comfortably on the proceeds from their bees; and there is no reason in the world why the idea should not be carried out by others with equal success.”

We had made the round of the whole busy, murmuring enclosure, and had come again to the little door in the wall. Passing through and out once more into the world of merely masculine endeavour, the bee-mistress gave me a final word.

“You may think,” said she, “that what I advocate, though successful in our own single instance, might prove impracticable on a widely extended scale. Well, do you know that last year close upon three hundred and fifty tons of honey were imported into Great Britain from foreign sources, [43] just because our home apiculturists were unable to cope with the national demand? And this being so, is it too much to think that, if women would only band themselves together and take up bee-keeping systematically, as we have done, all or most of that honey could be produced—of infinitely better quality—here, on our own British soil?”