“’Tis a good thing—life; but ye never know how good, really, till you’ve followed the bees to the heather.”  
It was an old saying of the bee-master’s, and it came again slowly from his lips now, as he knelt by the camp-fire, watching the of the flames round the bubbling pot.  We were in the heart of the Sussex moorland, miles away from the nearest village, still farther from the great bee-farm where, at other times, the old man drove his thriving trade.  But the bees were here—a million of them perhaps—all singing their loudest in the blossoming heather that stretched away on every side to the far horizon, under the sweltering August sun.
 
Getting the bees to the was always the chief event of the year down at the honey-farm.  For days the stood by the laneside, all ready to be loaded up with the best and most hives; but the exact moment of departure depended on one very uncertain factor.  The white-clover crop was almost at an end.  Every day saw the acreage of sainfoin narrowing, as the sheep-folds closed in upon it, leaving nothing but bare yellow waste, where had been a rolling sea of blossom.  But the charlock lay on every hillside like cloth-of-gold.  Until harvest was done the fallows were safe from the ploughshare, and what proved little else than a troublesome weed to the farmer was like golden guineas growing to every keeper of bees.
 
But at last the new moon brought a sharp night with it, and the long-awaited signal was given.  Coming down with the first grey glint of morning from the little room under the , I found the bee-garden in a swither of .  A faint smell of carbolic was on the air, and the shadowy figures of the bee-master and his men were hurrying from hive to hive, taking off the super-racks that stood on many three and four stories high.  The honey-barrows went to and fro under their burdens; and the earliest bees, roused from their rest by this unwonted , filled the grey dusk with their high note.
 
The bee-master came over to me in his white , a in the half-darkness.
 
“’Tis the honey-dew,” he said, out of breath, as he passed by.  “The first cold night of summer brings it out thick on every oak-leaf for miles around; and if we don’t get the supers off before the bees can gather it, the honey will be blackened and spoiled for market.”
 
He carried a curious bundle with him, an armful of fluttering pieces of calico, and I followed him as he went to work on a fresh row of hives.  From each bee-dwelling the roof was thrown off, the inner coverings removed, and one of the squares of cloth—damped with the carbolic solution—quickly over the topmost rack.  A sudden fearsome buzzing uprose within, and then a sudden silence.  There is nothing in the world a bee more than the smell of carbolic acid.  In a few seconds the super-racks were , the bees crowding down into the lowest depths of the hives.  The creaking barrows went down the long row in the track of the master, taking up the heavy racks as they passed.  Before the sun was well up over the hill-brow the last load had been safely gathered in, and the chosen hives were being piled into the waggons, ready for the long day’s journey to the moors.
 
All this was but a week ago; yet it might have been a week of years, so completely had these rose-red accepted our invasion, and absorbed us into their daily round of sun and song.  Here, in a green hollow of turf, right in the heart of the , the camp had been pitched—the white bell-tents with their skirts drawn up, showing the spindle-legged field-bedsteads within; the filling-house, made of lath and gauze, where the racks could be emptied and recharged with the little white wood section-boxes, safe from marauding bees; the honey-store, with its bee-proof mounting one upon the other, with rich brown heather-honey—the finest sweet-food in the world.  And round the camp, in a vast spreading circle, stood the hives—a hundred or more—knee-deep in the , each facing outward, and each a whirling vortex of life from early dawn to the last gleam of sunset under the silver of the stars.
 
The camp-fire crackled and , and the pot sent a savoury steam into the morning air.  From the heather the deep chant of busy thousands came over on the wings of the breeze, bringing with it the very spirit of content.  The bee-master rose and stirred the pot .
 
“B’iled rabbit!” said he, looking up, with the light of old memories coming in his gnarled brown face.  “And forty years ago, when I first came to the heather, it used to be b’iled rabbit too.  We could set a in those days as well as now.  But ’twas only a few hives then, a dozen or so of old straw skeps on a barrow, and but the night for a roof-tree, or a sack or two to keep off the rain.  None of your women’s luxuries in those times!”
 
He looked round rather at his own tent, with its plain truckle-bed, and tin wash-bowl, and other deplorable signs of effeminate self-indulgence.
 
“But there was one thing,” he went on, “one thing we used to bring to the moors that never comes now.  And that was the basket of sulphur-rag.  When the honey-flow is done, and the waggons come to fetch us home again, all the hives will go back to their places in the garden none the worse for their trip.  But in the old days of bee-burning never a bee of all the lot returned from the moors.  Come a little way into the long grass yonder, and I’ll show ye the way of it.”
 
With a stick he threshed about in the dry bents, and soon lay bare a row of circular cavities in the ground.  They were almost choked up with and the rank undergrowth of many years but originally they must have been each about ten ............