The bee-keepers in English villages to-day are all familiar—too familiar at times—with the holiday-making stranger at the garden gate inquiring for honey.  Somehow or other the demand for this old natural sweet-food appears to have greatly increased of recent years among wandering townsfolk in the country.  A competent bee-master, with a large number of combs, will not them indiscriminately, but will unerringly assort them, so that he will have perhaps at the end of the season almost as many kinds of honey in store as there are fields on his countryside.  I speak, of course, not of the large bee-farmer—who, employing of necessity methods, can aim only at a good all-round commercial sample of no finely colour or flavour—but of the in bee-craft, the among the hives, who knows that there are as many varieties in honey as there are in wine, and would as little dream of confusing them.  
Honey lovers who have been eating wax all their days will be as hardly from the practice as he whose custom it may be to consume the paper in which his butter is wrapped, or take a proportion of the blue sugar-bag with the lumps in his tea.  Yet the last are no more than the former, except in degree.  Pure beeswax has neither savour nor properties, and passes wholly unassimilated through the human system.  Even the bees themselves cannot feed upon it when at extremes: the whole hive may die of starvation in the midst of waxen plenty.  Of all creatures, mice, and the larva of two species of , alone will make away with it; and even in their case it is doubtful whether the comb be not destroyed for the sake of the odd grains of and the pupa-skins it contains.  Broadly speaking, unless you can trust a dipped finger-tip to reveal to you on the moment the qualities of this village-garden honey, it is always safer to buy in the comb.  But the wax should never be eaten.  The proper way to deal with honeycomb at table is to cut it to the width of the knife-blade; and, laying it upon the plate with the cells , press the blade flat upon it, when the honey will flow out right and left.  In this way, if duly carried out, the honey is scientifically separated, no more than one per cent remaining in the of wax.
 
It is not strange, because it is so common, to find people who have eaten honeycomb regularly all their lives, yet are unknowingly ignorant of the first rudimentary fact in its nature and composition.  To know that you do not know is an state, the initial true step towards knowledge; but to be full of erroneous information, and that , is to be ignorant indeed.  Of such are the old lady who dwelt in the Mile End Road, and believed that cocoanuts were monkeys’ eggs, and the man who will tell you without of contradiction that honey is the food of bees.
 
Now this is no essay in cheap , but a sober attempt to reinstate in the public mind the unsophisticated truth.  The natural foods of the bee-hive are the nectar and the pollen, the “love ferment” of the flowers.  On these the bee , so long as she can obtain them, and will go to her honey stores only when nature’s fresh supplies have failed.  One speaks by licence, or looseness, of bees honey from blossoming plants.  The fact is they do nothing of the kind, and never did.  The sweet juices of clover, heather, and the like, differ fundamentally, both in appearance and in chemical properties from honey.  Though the main ingredient in honey is nectar, the two are totally different things; and honey, far from being the normal food of bees, is only a standby for hard times, a sort of emergency , put up in as little compass and with as great a concentration as such things can be.
 
The story of how honey is made, and why it is made at all, forms one of the most interesting items in the history of the hive-bee.  In a land where nectar-yielding plants flourish all the year th............