“Books,” said the Bee-Master of Warrilow, looking round through grey wreaths of tobacco-smoke at his crowded shelves, “books seem to tell ye most things ne’ersome-matter; but when it comes to books on bees—well, ’tis somehow quite another pair o’ shoes.”
He stopped to listen to the wind, blowing great guns outside in the winter darkness. The little cottage seemed to and beneath the blast, and the rain drove against the lattice-windows with a , note. The bee-master drew the old oak settle nearer to the fire, and sat for a moment silently watching the comfortable blaze.
“‘True as print,’” he went on, more and more into the , tangy Sussex dialect, as his theme impressed him; “’twas an old saying o’ my father’s; and right enough, maybe, in his time. A’ couldn’t read, to be sure; so a’ might have been ower unsceptical. But books was too expensive in those days to put many lies into.”
He took down at from the case on the chimney-breast about a dozen modern, paper-covered on bee-keeping, and threw them, rather contemptuously, on the table.
“I’m not saying, mind ye,” he hastened to add, “that there’s a word against truth in any one of them. They’re all true enough, no doubt, for they contradict each other at every turn. ’Tis as if one man said roses was white; and another said, ‘No, you’re wrong, they’re yaller’; and a third said, ‘Y’are both wrong, they’re red.’ And when folks are in dispute in this way, because they agree, and not because they differ, there’s little hope of ever them.
“I heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years ago, that had a good word about bees. Said she, ‘They never do anything invariably’; and she warn’t far off the truth. She knew her own sex, did wise Mrs Tupper. Now, the trouble with the book-writers on bees is that they try to make a science of something that can never rightly be a science at all. They try to add two numbers together that they don’t know, an’ that are allers changing, and are surprised if they don’t arrive at an exact total. There’s the bees, and there’s the weather: together the result will be so many pounds of honey. If the English climate went by the calendar, and the bees worked according to unchangeable rules, you might reckon out your honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping would be little more than sitting in a summer-house and figuring on a . But with frosts in June, and August weather in February, and your honey-makers but a tribe of , sex-thwarted wimmin-folk, a nation of spinsters—how can bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist an’ turn o’ the way shows something cur’ous or different?”
He stopped to recharge his pipe from the earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like an old straw beehive, which had yielded to many a past generation of the Warrilow .
“’Tis just this matter of sex,” he continued, “that these book-writing bee-masters seem to leave altogether out of their reckoning. And yet it lies well to the heart of the whole business. In an average prosperous hive there are about thirty thousand of these little , quick-witted worker-bees, not one of which but could have grown into a -developed mother-bee, twice the size, and laying her thousands of eggs a day, if only her early bringings-up had been different. But nature has her to be an old maid from her very cradle, although she is born with all the instincts and for motherhood that you wonder at in a fully grown, queen. And yet the bee-masters expect her to accept her fate without a ; to live and work to-day just as she did yesterday and the day before; to tend and feed patiently the young bees that she has been denied all part in producing; to support a lot of lazy drones in luxury and idleness; and generally to act like a reasonable, , happy creature all the way through.”
He took three or four long, contemplative pulls at his Broseley clay, then came back to his subject and his dialect together.
“’Tis no wonder,” said he “that the little worker-bee gets crotchety time an’ again. Wimmin-creeturs is all of much the same kidney, whether ’tis bees or humans. Their natur’ is not to look ahead, but just to do the next thing. They sees sideways mostly, like a horse with an eye-shade but no blinkers. But now and then they ups and looks straight afore ’em, and then ’tis trouble fer masters o’ all kinds, whether in hives or homes o’ men. Lot’s wife, she were a kind o’ bee-woman; and so were Eve. I’d ha’ been glad to ha’ knowed ’em both, bless ’em! The world ’ud be all the sweeter fer a few more like they.&nb............