If you go to the bee-garden early of a fine summer’s morning you will be struck by the singular quiet of the place.  All the woods and hedgerows are ringing with busy life.  The rooks are cawing homeward with already hours of work behind them.  The cattle in the meadows are well through their first cud.  But as yet the bee-city is as still as the sleeping village around it.  Now and again a bee drops down from the sky on a hive-threshold with sleepy hum, and runs past the guards at the gate.  But these are bees that have wandered too far afield overnight, by the sunny warmth of the evening.  The dusk has caught them, and their flying-marks.  They have perforce camped out under some broad leaf, to be wakened by the earliest light of morning and hurry home with their belated loads.  
The sun is well up over the hillbrow before the visible life of the bee-garden begins to rouse in earnest.  The water-seekers are the first to appear.  Every hive has its traditional dipping-place, generally the of some neighbouring pond, where the house-martins have been wheeling and crying since the first grey of dawn.  Now the bees’ clear undertone begins to with the chippering chorus.  In a little while there is a thin straight line of humming music stretched between the hives and the pond: it could not be straighter if a surveyor had made it with his level.  Again a little while, and this long searchlight of melody thrown out by the bee-garden to the north.  You may track it straight over copse and meadow, seeing not a bee overhead, but guided unerringly by the arrow-flight of music, until, on the far hillside, it is lost in a perfect roar of sound.  Here the white-clover is in almost full blossom again: in southern England at least it is always the second crop of clover that yields the most harvest to the hives.
 
It must be a disturbing thing to those kindergarten moralists who hold the bee up to youth for an example of industry and to learn that she is by no means an early riser; though, at this time of year, she is both wealthy and wise.  For it is her very wisdom that now makes her a lie-abed.  When the iron is hot, she will not be slow in striking.  But it is nectar, not dewdrops, from which she makes her honey.  Very wisely she waits until the sun has drunk up the dew from the clover-bells, and then she hurries to their undiluted sweets.  Even then, perhaps, three-fourths of her burden will be carried uselessly.  In the -vats of the hive the nectar must stand and steam until three parts of its original bulk has evaporated, and its sugar has been into grape-sugar.  Then it is honey, but not before.  When we see the fanning-army at work by the entrance of a hive, it is not alone an undoubted passion for pure air that moves the bees to such ingenious activity.  In the height of the honey season many of vaporised liquid must be given off by the maturing stores in the course of a day and night, and all this water must be got rid of.  Herein is shown the wisdom of the bee-master who makes the walls of his hives of a material that is a bad conductor of heat.  It is a first necessity of health to the bees that the moisture in the air, which they are fanning out at this time, should not condense until it is safely from the hive.  A cold-walled hive can easily become a .
 
The bee-garden is quiet now in the sweet light of the summer’s morning; but the thought of it as containing so many houses of sleep, true of the village with its thatched human , could not well be farther from the truth in regard to the village of hives.  There is little sleep in a bee-hive in summer.  Of any common period of rest, of any quiet night when all but t............