“Books,” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, looking round through grey wreaths of tobacco-smoke at his crowded shelves, “books seem to tell ye most things ne’ersome-matter; but when it comes to books on bees—well, ’tis somehow quite another pair o’ shoes.”

He stopped to listen to the wind, blowing great guns outside in the winter darkness. The little cottage seemed to crouch and shudder beneath the blast, and the rain drove against the lattice-windows with a sobbing, timorous note. The bee-master drew the old oak settle nearer to the fire, and sat for a moment silently watching the comfortable blaze.

“‘True as print,’” he went on, lapsing more and more into the quaint, tangy Sussex dialect, as his theme impressed him; “’twas an old saying o’ my father’s; and right enough, maybe, in his time. A’ couldn’t read, to be sure; so a’ might have been ower unsceptical. But books was too expensive in those days to put many lies into.”

He took down at random from the case on the chimney-breast about a dozen modern, paper-covered treatises on bee-keeping, and threw them, rather contemptuously, on the table.

“I’m not saying, mind ye,” he hastened to add, “that there’s a word against truth in any one of them. They’re all true enough, no doubt, for they contradict each other at every turn. ’Tis as if one man said roses was white; and another said, ‘No, you’re wrong, they’re yaller’; and a third said, ‘Y’are both wrong, they’re red.’ And when folks are in dispute in this way, because they agree, and not because they differ, there’s little hope of ever pacifying them.

“I heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years ago, that had a good word about bees. Said she, ‘They never do anything invariably’; and she warn’t far off the truth. She knew her own sex, did wise Mrs Tupper. Now, the trouble with the book-writers on bees is that they try to make a science of something that can never rightly be a science at all. They try to add two numbers together that they don’t know, an’ that are allers changing, and are surprised if they don’t arrive at an exact total. There’s the bees, and there’s the weather: together the result will be so many pounds of honey. If the English climate went by the calendar, and the bees worked according to unchangeable rules, you might reckon out your honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping would be little more than sitting in a summer-house and figuring on a slate. But with frosts in June, and August weather in February, and your honey-makers naught but a tribe of whimsy, sex-thwarted wimmin-folk, a nation of everlasting spinsters—how can bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist an’ turn o’ the way shows something cur’ous or different?”

He stopped to recharge his pipe from the earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like an old straw beehive, which had yielded solace to many a past generation of the Warrilow clan.

“’Tis just this matter of sex,” he continued, “that these book-writing bee-masters seem to leave altogether out of their reckoning. And yet it lies well to the heart of the whole business. In an average prosperous hive there are about thirty thousand of these little stunted, quick-witted worker-bees, not one of which but could have grown into a fully-developed mother-bee, twice the size, and laying her thousands of eggs a day, if only her early bringings-up had been different. But nature has doomed her to be an old maid from her very cradle, although she is born with all the instincts and capabilities for motherhood that you wonder at in a fully grown, prolific queen. And yet the bee-masters expect her to accept her fate without a murmur; to live and work to-day just as she did yesterday and the day before; to tend and feed patiently the young bees that she has been denied all part in producing; to support a lot of lazy drones in luxury and idleness; and generally to act like a reasonable, contented, happy creature all the way through.”

He took three or four long, contemplative pulls at his Broseley clay, then came back to his subject and his dialect together.

“’Tis no wonder,” said he “that the little worker-bee gets crotchety time an’ again. Wimmin-creeturs is all of much the same kidney, whether ’tis bees or humans. Their natur’ is not to look ahead, but just to do the next thing. They sees sideways mostly, like a horse with an eye-shade but no blinkers. But now and then they ups and looks straight afore ’em, and then ’tis trouble brewing fer masters o’ all kinds, whether in hives or homes o’ men. Lot’s wife, she were a kind o’ bee-woman; and so were Eve. I’d ha’ been glad to ha’ knowed ’em both, bless ’em! The world ’ud be all the sweeter fer a few more like they. Harm done through being too much of a woman-creetur is never all harm in the long run, depend on’t.”

With his great sunburnt hand he stirred the flimsy, dog-eared pamphlets about thoughtfully, as a man will stir leaves with a stick.

“A Natural Honey-Bees’ Nest”

“Now, ’tis just this way with bees,” he went on. “If you study how to keep ’em busy, with plain, right-down necessity hard at their heels, all goes well. The bees have no time for anything but work. As the supers fill with honey you take them off and put empty ones in their place. The queen below fills comb after comb with eggs, and you make the brood-nest larger and larger. There is allers more room everywhere, dropped down from the skies, like; no matter how fast the stock increases, nor how much the bees bring in. Just their plain day’s work is enough, and more’n enough, for the best of them. And so the summer heat goes by; the honey harvest is ended; and the bees have had no chance to dwell upon, and grow rebellious over, the wise wrong that nature has done their sex. In bee-life ’tis always evil that’s wrought, not by want o’ thought, but by too much of it. Bad beemanship is just giving bees time to think.”

“Many’s the time,” continued the bee-master, thrusting the bowl of his empty pipe into the heart of the wood-embers for lustration, and taking a clean one down for immediate use from the rack over his head; “many’s the time an’ oft it has come ower me that perhaps bees warn’t allers as we see them now. Maybe, way back in the times when England was a tropic country, tens of thousands o’ years ago, there was no call for them to live packed together in one dark chamber, as they do to-day. If the year was warm all the twelve months through, and flowers allers blooming, there ’ud be no need fer a winter-larder, nor fer any hives at all. Like as not each woman-bee lived by herself then, in some dry nook or other; made her little nest of comb, and brought up her own children, happy and comfortable. Maybe, even—and I can well believe it of her, knowing her natur’ as I do—she kept a gurt, buzzing, blusterous drone about the place an’ let him eat and drink in idleness while she did all the work, willing enough, for the two. Then, as the world slowly cooled down through the centuries, there came a short time in each year when the flowers ceased to bloom, and the bees found they had to put by a store of honey, to last till the heat and the blossoms showed up again. And there was another thing they must have found out when the cold spell was over the earth. Bees that kept apart by themselves died of cold, but those that huddled together in crowds lived warm enough throughout the winter. The more there were of ’em the warmer they kept, and the less food they needed. And so, as the winters got longer and colder, the bee-colonies increased, until at last, from force of habit, they took to keeping together all the year round. So you see, like as not, ’tis experience as has brought ’em to build their cities of to-day, just as experience, or the One ye never mention, has put the same thing into the hearts o’ men.”

A sudden flaw of wind struck the little cottage with a sound like thunder, and made the cut-glass lustres on the mantle tinkle and glitter in the yellow candle-glow. The old bee-man stopped, with his pipe half-way to his mouth, nodded gravely towards the window, in a kind of obeisance to the elements, and then resumed his theme.

“But there’s a many things about bees,” he said, “that no man ’ull come to the rights of, until all airthly things is made clear in the Day o’ Days. The great trouble and hindrance to bee-keeping is the swarm, and a good bee-master nowadays tries all he can to circumvent it. But the old habit comes back again and again, and often with stocks of bees that haven’t had a fit o’ it for years. Now, did ye ever think what swarming must have been in the beginning?”

He suddenly levelled the pipe-stem straight at my head.

“Well, ’tis all speckilation, but here’s my idee o’ it, for what ’tis worth. Take the wapses: they’re thousands of years behind the honey-bee in development, and so they give ye a look, so to speak, into the past. The end of a wapse-colony comes when the females are ready in November; and hundreds of them go off to hide for the winter, each in some hole or crevice, until, in the warm spring days, each comes out to start a new and separate home. Well, perhaps the honey-bees did much the same thing long ago, when they were all mother-bees, in the time when the world was young. And perhaps the swarm-fever in a hive to-day is naught but a kind o’ memory of this, still working, though its main use is gone. The books here will tell ye o’ many other things brought about by swarming, right an’ good enough with the old-fashioned hives. Yet that gainsays nothing. Nature allers works double an’ treble handed in all her dealings. Her every stroke tells far and wide, like the thousand ripples you make when you pitch a stone in a pond.”