From the lane, where it dipped down between its rose-mantled hedges, nothing of the bee-garden could be seen. The dense barricade of briar and hawthorn hid all but the lichened roof of the ancient dwelling-house; and strangers going by on their way to the village saw nothing of the crowding hives, and marked little else than the usual busy murmur of insect-life common to any sunny day in June.

But when they came out of the green tunnel of hedgerows into the open fields beyond, chance wayfarers always stopped and looked about them wonderingly, at length fixing a puzzled glance intently on the blue sky itself. At this corner, and nowhere else, seemingly, the air was full of a deep, reverberant music. A steady torrent of rich sound streamed by overhead; and yet, to the untutored observer, the most diligent scrutiny failed to reveal its origin. A few gnats harped in the sunbeams. Now and again a bumble-bee struck a deep chord or two in the wayside herbage underfoot. But this clear, strong voice from the skies was altogether unexplainable. To human sight, at least, the blue air and sunshine held nothing to account for it; and the stranger unversed in honey-bee lore, after taking his fill of this melodious mystery, generally ended by giving up the problem as insoluble, and passing on to his business or pleasure in the little green-garlanded hamlet under the hill.

That the bees of a fairly large apiary should produce a considerable volume of sound in their passage to and fro between the hives and the honey-pastures is in no way remarkable. In the heyday of the year—the brief six weeks’ honey-flow of the English summer—probably each normal colony of bees would send out an army of foragers at least twenty thousand strong. What really seems matter for wonder is the way in which bees appear to concentrate their movements to certain well-defined tracks in the atmosphere. They do not distribute themselves broadcast over the intervening space, as they might be expected to do, but wonderfully keep to certain definite restricted thoroughfares, no matter how near or how remote their foraging grounds may be.

And this particular gap in the chain of hedgerows really marked the great main highway for the bees between the hives and the clover-fields silvering the whole wide stretch of hill and dale beyond. Every moment had its winged thousands going and returning. At any time, if a fine net could have been cast suddenly a few fathoms upward, it would have fallen to earth black and heavy with bees; but the singing multitude went by at so fast and furious a pace that, to the keenest sight, not one of the eager crew was visible. Only the sound of their going was plain to all; a mighty tenor note abroad in the sunshine, a thronging sustained melody that never ceased all through the heat and burthen of the glittering summer’s day.

When Shelley heard the “yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,” and he of Avonside wrote of “singing masons building roofs of gold,” probably neither thought of the humming of the hive-bee as anything more than an ingredient in the general delightful country chorus, as distinct from the less-inspiring labour-note of busy humanity in a town. With the single exception, perhaps, of Wordsworth, poets, thinking most of their line, commonly miss the subtler phases of wild life, such as the continually changing emphasis and capricious variation in bird song, the real sound made by growth, or the unceasing movement of things conventionally held to be inert. And in the same way the endlessly varied song of the bees has been epitomised by imaginative writers generally into a sound, pleasantly arcadian enough, but little more suggestive of life and meaning than the hum of telegraph wires in a breeze.

Yet there are few sounds in nature more bewilderingly complex than this. For every season in the year the song of the hives has its own distinct appropriate quality, and this, again, is constantly influenced by the time of day, and even by the momentary aspect of the weather. A bee-keeper of the old school—and he is sure to be the “character,” the quaint original of a village—manages his hives as much by ear as by sight. The general note of each hive reveals to him intuitively its progress and condition. He seems to know what to expect on almost any day in the year, so that if Rip van Winkle had been an apiarist the nearest bee-garden would have been as sure a guide to him, in respect of the time of year at least, as the sun’s declining arc in the heaven is to the tired reapers in respect of the hour of day.

Most people—and with these must be included even lifelong country-dwellers—are wont to regard the humming of the hive-bee as a simple monotone, produced entirely by the rapid movement of the wings. But this conception halts very far short of the actual truth. In reality, the sound made by a honey-bee is threefold. It can consist either of a single tone, a combination of two notes, or even a grand triple chord, heard principally in moments of excitement, such as when a swarming-party is on the wing, or in late autumn and early spring, when civil war will often break out in an ill-managed apiary. The actual buzzing sound is produced by the wings; the deeper musical tones by the air alternately sucked in and driven out through the spiracles, which are breathing-tubes ranged along each side of a bee’s body; while the shrill, clarinet-like note comes from the true voice-apparatus itself. In ordinary flight it is the wings and the respiration-tubes conjointly which produce the steady volume of sound heard as the honey-makers stream over the hedgetop towards the distant clover-fields; and this is the note also that pervades the bee-garden through every sunny hour of the working-day. The rich, soft murmur coming from the spiracles is probably never heard except when the bee is flying, but both the true voice and the whirring wing-melody are familiar as separate sounds to every bee-keeper who studies his hives.When the summer night has shut down warm and still over the red dusk of evening, and the last airy loiterer is safely home from the fields, a curious change comes to the bee-garden. The old analogy between a concourse of hives and a human city is, at this season, utterly at fault. Silence and rest after the day’s work may be the portion of the larger community, but in the time of the great honey-flow there is neither rest nor slumber for the bees. A fury of labour possesses them, one and all; and darkness does not remit, but merely transposes the scene of their activity. Coming out into the garden at this hour for a quiet pipe among the hives—an old and favourite habit with most bee-keeping veterans—the new spirit abroad is at once manifest. The sulky, fragrant darkness is silent, quiet with the influence of the starshine overhead; but the very earth of the footway seems to vibrate with the imprisoned energy of the hives. This is the time when the low, rustling roar of wing-music can best be heard, and one of the most wonderful phases of bee-life studied. The problem of the ventilation of human hives is attacked commonly on one main principle—unstinted ingress for fresh air and a like abundant means of outward passage for the bad. But, if the bees are to be credited, modern sanitary scientists are trimming altogether on the wrong tack. A colony of bees will allow one aperture, and one alone, in the hive, to serve all and every purpose. If the enterprising novice in beemanship gimlets a row of ventilation-holes in the back of his hive—an idea that occurs to most tyros in apiculture—the bees will infallibly seal them all up again before morning. They work on entirely different principles, impelled by their especial needs. The economy of the hive requires the temperature to be absolutely and immediately within the control of the bees, and this is only possible when the ventilatory system is entirely mechanical. The evaporation of moisture from the new-gathered nectar, and the hatching of the young brood, necessitate an amount of heat much less than that required for wax-generating; as soon as the wax-makers begin to cluster the temperature of the hive is at once increased. But if a current of air were continually passing through the hive these necessary heat variations would be difficult to manage, even supposing them possible at all; so the bees have invented their unique system of a single passageway, combined with an ingenious and complicated process of fanning, by which the fresh air is sucked in at one side of the entrance and the foul air drawn out at the other, the atmosphere of the hive being thus maintained in a constant state of circulation, fast or slow, according to the temperature needed.

In the hot summer weather these fanning-parties are at work continuously, being relieved by others at intervals of a few minutes throughout the day. But at night, when the whole population of the hive is at home, the need for ventilation is greatly augmented, and then the open lines of fanners often stretch out over the alighting-board six or seven ranks deep, making an harmonious uproar that, on a still night, will travel incredible distances.

This tense, forceful labour-song of the bee-garden, heard unremittingly throughout the hours of darkness, is always pleasant, often indescribably soothing in its effect. But it is essentially a communal note, expressive only of the well or ill being of the hive at large. The individuality, even personal idiosyncrasy, which undoubtedly exists among bees, finds its utterance mainly through the true voice-organ. You cannot stand for long, here, in the quiet of the summer night, listening to one particular hive, without sooner or later becoming aware of other sounds, in addition to the general musical hubbub of the fanning army. It is evident that a nervous, high-strung spirit pervades the colony, especially during the season of the great honey-flow. Their common agreement on all main issues does not prevent these “virgin daughters of toil” from engaging in sundry sharp altercations and mutual hustlings in the course of their business; and, at times of threatening weather, a tendency towards snappishness, and a whimsical perversity characteristically feminine, seem to make up the prevailing tone. It is during these chance forays that the true voice of the honey-bee, apart from the sounds made by wing and spiracle, can best be differentiated.