bee-houses as a protection for the hives, though they are disapproved of by many modern writers. They serve to moderate the temperature in winter and summer, and screen the neighbourhood of the hive in rough weather. Dr. Bevan says:

Excepting in peculiarly sheltered nooks, an apiary would not be well situated near a great river, nor in the neighbourhood of the sea, as in windy weather the bees would be in danger of drowning from being blown into the water.. ... ... Yet it should not be far from a rivulet or spring; such streams as glide gently over pebbles are the most desirable, as these afford a variety of resting-places for the bees to alight upon. (This is almost a translation of Virgil's 'In medium, seu stabit iners,' &c.) 'Water is most important to them, particularly in the early part of the season. Let shallow troughs, therefore, never be neglected to be set near the hives, if no natural stream is at hand.'

It seems that bees, like men, require a certain quantity of saline matter for their health. In the Isle of Wight the people have a notion that every bee goes down to sea to drink twice a-day;' and they are certainly seen to drink at the farm-yard pool—

'the gilded puddle

That beasts would cough at '

when clearer water is near. Following the example of our modern graziers, a small lump of rock-salt might be a useful medicine-chest for our winged stock. Foul smells and loud noises have always been thought annoying to bees, and hence it is deemed advisable never to place the hives in the neighbourhood of forges, pigsties, and the like. Virgil even fancied that they disliked the neighbourhood of an echo: but upon this Gilbert White, of Selborne, remarks :—

This wild and fanciful assertion will hardly be admitted by the philosophers of these days, especially as they all now seem agreed that insects are not furnished with any organs of hearing at all. But if it should be urged that, though they cannot hear, yet perhaps they may feel the repercussion of sounds, I grant it is possible they may. Yet that these impressions are distasteful or hurtful I deny, because bees, in good summers, thrive well in my outlet, where the echoes are very strong; for this village is another Anathoth, a place of responses or echoes. Besides, it does not appear from experiment that bees are in any way capable of being affected by sounds; for I have often tried my own with a large speaking-trumpet held close to their hives, and with such an exertion of voice as would have hailed a ship at the distance of a mile, and still these insects pursued their various employments undisturbed, and without showing the least sensibility or resentment.'*

* Of Gilbert White-who by the way was not parson of the parish,' but continued a Fellow of Oriel till his death-all that could be heard at the scene of his researches by a late diligent inquirer was, that he was a still, quiet body, and that there was not a bit of harm in him.' And such is the fame of a man the power of whose writings has immortalized an obscure village and a tortoise-for who has not heard of 'Timothy ?-as long as the English language lives!

Next to the situation of the hive is the consideration of the bees' pasturage. When there is plenty of the white Dutch clover, sometimes called honeysuckle, it is sure to be a good honey-year. The red clover is too deep for the proboscis of the common bee, and is therefore not so useful to them as is generally thought. Many lists have been made of bee-flowers, and of such as should be planted round the apiary. Mignionette, and borage, and rosemary, and bugloss, and lavender, the crocus for the early spring, and the ivy flowers for the late autumn, might help to furnish a very pretty bee-garden; and the lime and liquid amber, the horse-chestnut, and the sallow would be the best trees to plant around. Dr. Bevan makes a very good suggestion, that lemon-thyme should be used as an edging for gardenwalks and flower-beds, instead of box, thrift, or daisies. That any material good, however, can be done to a large colony by the few plants that, under the most favourable circumstances, can be sown around a bee-house is of course out of the question. The bee is too much of a roamer to take pleasure in trim gardens. It is the wild tracts of heath and furze, the broad acres of bean-fields and buck-wheat, the lime avenues, the hedgerow flowers, and the clover meadows, that furnish his haunts and fill his cell. Still it may be useful for the young and weak bees to have food as near as possible to their home, and to those who wish to watch their habits a plot of bee-flowers is indispensable; and we know not the bee that could refuse the following beautiful invitation by Professor Smythe :

'Thou cheerful Bee! come, freely come,

And travel round my woodbine bower!
Delight me with thy wandering hum,

And rouse me from my musing hour:
Oh! try no more those tedious fields,
Come, taste the sweets my garden yields:
The treasures of each blooming mine,
The bud, the blossom,-all are thine.'

Pliny bids us plant thyme and apiaster, violets, roses, and lilies. Columella, who, contrary to all other authority, says that limes are hurtful, advises cytisus, rosemary, and the evergreen pine. That the prevalent flower of a district will flavour the honey is certain. The delicious honey of the Isle of Bourbon will taste for years of the orange-blossoms, from which, we believe, it is gathered, and on opening a bottle of it the room will be filled with the perfume. The same is the case with the honey of Malta. Corsican honey is said to be flavoured by the box-tree, and we have heard of honey being rendered useless which was gathered in the neighbourhood of onion-fields. No one who has kept bees in the neighbourhood

neighbourhood of a wild common can fail to have remarked its superior flavour and bouquet. The wild rosemary that abounds in the neighbourhood of Narbonne gives the high flavour for which the honey of that district is so renowned. But the plant the most celebrated for this quality is the classic and far-famed thyme of Mount Hymettus, the Satureia capitata of botanists. This, we are assured by Pliny, was transplanted from the neighbourhood of Athens into the gardens of the Roman bee-keepers, but they failed to import with it the flavour of the Hymettic honey; for the exiled plant, which, according to this author, never flourished but in the neighbourhood of the ocean, languished for the barren rocks of Attica and the native breezes of its own blue sea.' And the honey of the Hymettus has not departed with the other glories of old Greece, though its flavour and aroma are said to be surpassed by that of neighbouring localities once famous from other causes. While the silver-mines of Laurium are closed, and no workman's steel rings in the marble-quarries of the Pentelicus, the hum of five thousand bee-hives is still heard among the thyme, the cistus, and the lavender which yet clothe these hills. The Cecropian bees,' says C. Wordsworth, have survived all the revolutions which have changed the features and uprooted the population of Attica:' though the defile of Thermopyla has become a swampy plain, and the bed of the Cephisus is laid dry, this one feature of the country has remained unaltered:

And still his honey'd store Hymettus yields,
There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds,
The free-born wanderer of thy mountain-air.'

The honey here collected used to be reserved for the especial eating of the archbishop of the district, and few travellers could even get a taste of it. Such was the case a few years ago: we presume the purchase of the Hymettus by a countryman of ours, Mr. Bracebridge, who has also built him a villa there, must have tended to abolish the episcopal monopoly.

It has been often discussed whether a country can be overstocked with bees; we believe this is quite as certain as that it may be over-peopled and over-manufactured. But that this is not yet the case with regard to Britain, as far at least as bees are concerned, we feel equally sure. Of course it is impossible to ascertain what number of acres is sufficient for the support of a single hive, so much depending on the season and the nature of the herbage; but, nevertheless, in Bavaria only a certain number of hives is allowed to be kept, and these must be brought to an establishment under the charge of a skilful apiarian, each station being four miles apart, and containing 150 hives.

This is centralization and red-tapery with a vengeance! A story is told that in a village in Germany where the number of hives kept was regulated by law, a bad season had nevertheless proved: that the place was overstocked from the great weakness of all the stalls in the neighbourhood. There was but one exception. This was the hive of an old man, who was generally set down as being no wiser than his neighbours, and this perhaps all the more because he was very observant of the habits of his little friends, as well as careful in harvesting as much honey as he could. But how came his hive to prosper when all the rest were falling off? His cottage was no nearer the pasture. He certainly must have bewitched his neighbours' hives, or made no canny' bargain for his own. Many were the whisperings and great the suspicions that no good would come of the gaffer's honey thus mysteriously obtained. The old man bore all these surmises patiently; the honey-harvest came round, and when he had stored away just double what any of the rest had saved, he called his friends and neighbours together, took them into his garden and said— If you had been more charitable in your opinions, I would have told you my secret before

This is the only witchcraft I have used :—

and he pointed to the inclination of his hives-one degree more to the east than was generally adopted. The conjuration was soon cleared up; the sun came upon his hives an hour or two sooner by this movement, and his bees were up and stirring, and had secured a large share of the morning's honey, before his neighbours' bees had roused themselves for the day. Mr. Cotton, who gives the outline of the story which we have ventured to fill up, quotes the proverb that early birds pick up most worms,' and draws the practical moral, in which we heartily concur, that your bedroom-window should always, if possible, face the east.

In an arable country, with little waste land and good farming, very few stocks can be supported; and this has led some enthusiastic bee-masters to regret. the advancement of agriculture, and the consequent decrease of wild flowers or weeds, according to the eye that views them—and the enclosure of wastes and commons. Even a very short distance will make a great differ

*

ence

* We can hardly ask, much less expect, that hedge-side swards should be made broader, and corn-fields be left unweeded, and the ploughshare be stayed, for the sake of the bee; but we do boldly enter our protest against the enclosure and planting of her best pasturage-our wild heath-grounds. And not for her sake only, but lest the taste, health, or pleasure of the proprietor himself should suffer any detriment. More strenuous advocates for planting than ourselves exist not. The dictum of the great Master of the North, Be aye sticking in a tree, Jock, it will be growing while ye are sleeping-put forth in the Heart of Mid Lothian,' and repeated by him in our Journal, -has been the parent of many a fair plantation, and may it produce many more! But

there

ence in the amount of honey collected. We know of an instance where a bee-keeper at Carshalton in Surrey, suspecting, from the fighting of his bees and other signs, that there was not pasturage enough in the immediate neighbourhood, conveyed away one of his lightest and most worthless hives, and hid it in the Woodmansterne furzes, a distance of about a mile and a half. Fortunately it lay there undiscovered, and on removing it home he found that it had become one of his heaviest hives. We mention this as a case coming under our own knowledge, because a late writer, who has shown rather a waspish disposition in his attacks on Mr. Cotton's system, seems to question not only the advantage, but the practicability of the transportation of hives altogether. But the fact is, that in the north of England and in Scotland, where there are large tracts of heather-land apart from any habitation, nothing is more common than for the bee-masters of the towns and villages to submit their hives during the honey season to the care of the shepherd of the district. About six miles from Edinburgh,' says Dr. Bevan, at the foot of one of the Pentland Hills, stands Logan House, supposed to be the residence of the Sir William Worthy celebrated by Allan Ramsay in his "Gentle Shepherd." The house is at present occupied by a shepherd, who about the beginning of August receives about a hundred bee-hives from his neighbours resident beyond the hills, that the bees may gather honey from the luxuriant blossoms of the mountain-heather.' Mr. Cotton saw a man in Germany who had 200 stocks, which he managed to keep all rich by changing their places as soon as the honey-season varied. 'Sometimes he sends them to the moors, sometimes to the meadows, sometimes to the forest, and sometimes to the hills.' He also speaks of it being no uncommon sight in Switzerland to see a man journeying with a bee-hive at his back.

There is something very interesting and Arcadian in this lead

there are rush-bearing commons, and ragged banks of gravel, and untractable clay-lands, and hassocky nooks, enough and to spare, the fit subjects for new plantations, without encroaching upon our thymy downs and heather hills. The land of the mountain and the flood may indeed afford from her very riches in this respect to spare some of her characteristic acres of bonny blooming heather;' and there are parts of the northern and midland counties of England that can equally endure the sacrifice;-but spareoh, spare-to spread the damp sickly atmosphere of a crowded plantation over the few free, bracing, breezy heath-grounds which the south can boast of.-Such a little range of hills we know in Surrey, lying between Addington and Coombe, now sadly encroached upon by belts and palings since our boyhood days. Only let a man once know what a summer's evening stroll over such a hill, as it sleeps in moonlight luxury,' is let him but once have tasted the dry, fresh, and balmy air of such a pebbly bank of heath, without a tree, save perhaps a few pines, within a mile around, when all the valley and the woodland below are wet with dew and dank with foliage,— and then say whether such an expanse can be well exchanged for any conceivable advantage of thicket or grove.