From the lane, where it dipped down between its rose-mantled hedges, nothing of the bee-garden could be seen.  The of briar and hid all but the 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 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 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, music.  A steady of rich sound streamed by overhead; and yet, to the untutored observer, the most failed to reveal its origin.  A few 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 , after taking his fill of this 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 should produce a considerable volume of sound in their passage to and fro between the hives and the honey-pastures is in no way .  In the 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 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 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 note abroad in the sunshine, a 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 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 .  And in the same way the endlessly 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 aspect of the weather.  A bee-keeper of the old school—and he is sure to be the “character,” the 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 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 in respect of the hour of day.
 
Most people—and with these must be included even lifelong country-dwellers—are to regard the humming of the hive-bee as a simple monotone, produced 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 wi............