There are three great tokens of the coming of spring in the country—the elm-blossom, the cry of the young lambs, and the first rich song of the bees.  
All three come together about the end of February or beginning of March, and break into the winter and silence in much the same sudden, unpremeditated way.  You look at the woodlands, under the of the north wind, and all seems bare and black and lifeless.  But the wind dies down in a sunset.  With the darkness comes a warm breath out of the west.  On the morrow the spring sunshine runs high through all the valleys like liquid gold; the elm-tops are with purple; from the lambing-pens far and near a new cry lifts into the still, warm air; and in the bee-gardens there is the unwonted, old-remembered symphony, prophetic of the coming summer days.
 
The shepherd, the bee-man, the woodlander—these three live in the focus of the seasons, and feel their changes long before any other class of country folk.  But the bee-man, if he would , must take the sun as his veritable daily guide from year’s end to year’s end.  Those whose conception of a bee-keeper is mainly of one who looks on from his cottage door while his winged thousands work for him, and who has but to stretch out his hand once a year to gather the he has had no part in winning, know little of modern beemanship.  This would be almost true of the old skeppist days, when bees were left much to their own devices, and thirty pounds of indifferent honey was reckoned a good take from a hive.  But the modern movable comb-frame has altered all that.  Now ninety or a hundred pounds weight of honey per hive is expected, with ordinarily good seasons, on a well-managed bee-farm; and in exceptional honey-flows very strong stocks of bees have been known to double and even treble that amount.
 
The movable comb-frame has three prime uses.  The hives can be opened at any time and their condition without having to wait for outside indications.  Brood-combs, with the young bees all ready to hatch out, can be taken from strong colonies and given to weak ones, and thus the population of all stocks may be equalised.  The filled honeycombs can be removed, emptied by the centrifugal extractor, and the combs returned to the hive ready for another charge; and so the most and labour of the hive, comb-building, is largely .
 
The modern beehive has another great advantage over the old straw skep, in that its size can be regulated according to the needs of each colony. More combs can be added as the stock grows, and thus no limit is set to its capacity.  With the ancient form of hive fifteen or twenty thousand bees meant a crowded , and there was nothing for it but to relieve the by .  But the swarming habit has always been the principal obstacle to large honey-takes; and the problem which the modern bee-keeper has to solve is how to prevent his stocks from thus breaking themselves up into several hopelessly weak detachments.
 
It is all a war of wits between the bees and their masters.  In nature the honey-bee is of an caution.  Famine is especially , and the number of mouths to fill in a hive is always kept to the limits of the incoming food-supply.  Thus a natural bee-colony is seldom ready for the honey-flow when it begins in early April, because it is only then that the raising of the young brood is allowed its fullest scope.  This, however, is of no importance as far as the bees themselves are concerned, for a balance of stores of about twenty pounds weight at the end of a season will safely carry the most populous colony through any ordinary winter.
 
But from the bee-master’s point of view it means practically a lost harvest.  All the arts and devices of the modern bee-keeper, therefore, are set to work to overcome this timid conservatism of the hives, and to induce the creation of immense colonies of worker-bees as early as possible in the season, so that there may be no lack of labourers when the harvest is ready.
 
These first warm days of March, that bring the elm-blossom, and the cry of the lambs, and the old sweet music of the bee-gardens together, really form the most critical time of all for the who depends on his honey for his bread-and-butter.  It is the natural beginning of the bee-year, and on his skill as a from now all chance of a prosperous season will rest.  It is true that, within the hive, the bees have been awake and stirring for a long time past.  Ever since the “turn of the days,” just before Christmas, the queen-............