a
quieting, pastoral turn it gives to life! You can keep them in the
city--on the roof or in the attic--just as you can actually live in the
city, if you have to; but bees, even more than cows, suggest a rural
prospect, old-fashioned gardens, pastures, idyls,--things out of
Virgil, and Theocritus--and out of Spenser too,--

"And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft,
A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
And ever drizling raine upon the loft,
Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne:
No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,
As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne
Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes,
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes"

that is not the land of the lotus, but of the _melli-lotus_, of lilacs,
red clover, mint, and goldenrod--a land of honey-bee. Show me the
bee-keeper and I will show you a poet; a lover of waters that go softly
like Siloa; with the breath of sage and pennyroyal about him; an
observer of nature, who can handle his bees without veil or gloves.
Only a few men keep bees,--only philosophers, I have found. They are a
different order utterly from hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raising
being respectively the poetry and prose of country life, though there
are some things to be said for the hen, deficient as the henyard is in
euphony, rhythm, and tune.

In fact there is not much to be said for the bee, not much that the
public can understand; for it is neither the bee nor the eagle that is
the true American bird, but the rooster. In one of my neighboring
towns five thousand petitioners recently prayed the mayor that they be
allowed to let their roosters crow. The petition was granted. In all
that town, peradventure, not five bee-keepers could be found, and for
the same reason that so few righteous men were found in Sodom.

Bee-keeping, like keeping righteous, is exceedingly difficult; it is
one of the fine arts, and no dry-mash-and-green-bone affair as of hens.
Queens are a peculiar people, and their royal households, sometimes an
hundred thousand strong, are as individual as royal houses are liable
to be.

I have never had two queens alike, never two colonies that behaved the
same, never two seasons that made a repetition of a particular handling
possible. A colony of bees is a perpetual problem; the strain of the
bees, the age and disposition of the queen, the conditio