We were in the great high-road of Warrilow bee-farm, and had stopped midway down in the heart of the waxen city.  On every hand the hives stretched away in long trim rows, and the hot June sunshine was alive with bees and with the smell of new-made honey.  
“?” said the bee-master, in answer to a question I had put to him.  “We never allow swarming here.  My bees have to work for me, and not for themselves; so we have discarded that old-fashioned notion long ago.”
 
He brought his honey-barrow to a halt, and sat down on the handle.
 
“Swarming,” he went on to explain, “is the great trouble in modern bee-keeping.  It is a bad left us by the old-time skeppists.  With the ancient straw hives and the old methods of working, it was all very well.  When bee-burning was the custom, and all the heaviest hives were foredoomed to the sulphur-pit, the best bees were those that gave the earliest and the largest .  The more stocks there were in the garden the more honey there would be for market. Swarming was encouraged in every possible way.  And so, at last, the steady, stay-at-home variety of honey-bee became , and only the swarmers were kept to carry on the strain.”
 
I quoted the time-honoured about a in May being worth a load of hay.  The bee-master laughed .
 
“To the modern bee-keeper,” he said, “a swarm in May is little short of a disgrace.  There is no clearer sign of bad beemanship nowadays than when a strong colony is allowed to weaken itself by swarming on the eve of the great honey-flow, just when strength and numbers are most needed.  Of course, in the old days, the maxim held true enough.  The straw skeps had room only for a certain number of bees, and when they became too crowded there was nothing for it but to let the colonies split up in the natural way.  But the modern frame-hive, with its extending brood-chamber, does away with that necessity.  Instead of the old beggarly ten or twelve thousand, we can now raise a population of forty or fifty thousand bees in each hive, and so treble and quadruple the honey-harvest.”
 
“But,” I asked him, “do not the bees go on swarming all the same, if you let them?”
 
“The old instincts die hard,” he said.  “Some day they will learn more scientific ways; but as yet they have not realised the change that modern bee-keeping has made in their condition.  Of course, swarming has its clear, definite purpose, apart from that of relieving the of the stock.  When a hive swarms, the old queen goes off with the flying squadron, and a new one takes her place at home.  In this way there is always a young and vigorous queen at the head of affairs, and the of the parent stock is assured.  But advanced bee-keepers, whose sole object is to get a large honey yield, have long recognised that this is a very expensive way of old colonies.  The parent hive will give no surplus honey for that season; and the swarm, unless it is a large and very early one, will do little else than furnish its brood-nest for the coming winter.  But if swarming be prevented, and the stock requeened artificially every two years, we keep an immense population always ready for the great honey-flow, whenever it begins.”
 
He took up the heavy barrow, with its pile of super-racks, and started trundling it up the path, talking as he went.
 
“If only the bees could be persuaded to leave the queen-raising to the bee-keeper, and would attend to nothing else but the great business of honey-getting!  But they won’t—at least, not yet.  Perhaps in another hundred years or so the old wild habits may be bred out of them; but at present it is doubtful whether they are conscious of any ‘keeping’ at all.  They go the old tried paths ; and the most that we can accomplish is to that part of their work which is not to our , or to make a smoother road for them in the direction they themselves have chosen.”
 
“But you said just now,” I objected, “that no swarming was allowed among your bees.  How do you manage to prevent it?”
 
“It is not so much a question of prevention as of cure.  Each hive must be watched carefully from the beginning.  From the time the queen commences to lay, in the first mild days of spring, we keep the size of the brood nest just a little ahead of her requirements.  Every week or two I put in a new frame of empty combs, and when she has ten frames to work upon, and honey is getting , I begin to put on the store-racks above, just as I am doing now.  This will generally keep them to business; but with all the care in the world the swarming fever will sometimes set in.  And then I always treat it in this way.”
 
He had stopped before one of the ............