60 NEVER KILL YOUR BEES. always a good sign. It shows that the owner takes pleasure in his home. He has something to fill up his spare minutes better than the beershop, and far more profitable too. Whenever I stop to have a talk with him about the Bees, I always get a civil answer, and thanks for any thing I can tell him. There is an old and true saying, that it is no use trying to help a man who will not help himself. Now the cottager, who keeps Bees, is trying to help himself and his family too; and the help which I can give such a man will most likely come to good. I often hear, that when a man has good luck in the swarming time, and when it is luckily a good Bee year, the money he gets for his honey goes a good way to pay his rent, or to get some warm things for the winter. Now some years are certainly better Bee years than others. Man has nothing to do with the weather. But I wish to show you, my friends, how to make the most of good years when they do come, and that a little common sense, with pains taken in a good way, has more to do with the matter than what call you LUCK. you In the first place, then, NEVER KILL YOUR BEES. Many of will say, “Our father and grandfather did so, and why should not we ?" (Now it is a very good rule to do as your fathers did, when THE OLD OXFORDSHIRE THATCHER. 61 you are not quite sure you can do better, but I hope to show you that this new path is better and straighter too.) "We think it far the best way to burn the lightest and the heaviest. The first would not live through the winter; we may get something from them, and plenty from the heaviest." This is very well for those who know no better; but I am sure you are all willing to try a better way if you hear of one, as every one of you must feel some sorrow when you murder by thousands in the autumn those who have worked hard for you all the summer, and are ready to do so again next year. I myself was told by a Beemaster that he always saw the ghosts of the Bees the night after he burned them; and have heard of an old woman who never went to church the Sunday following. She felt she had done a most cruel deed, and she was right in so thinking, though wrong in staying away from church for this reason. If she felt it a sin, she ought to have gone to church, to pray God from her inmost soul to pardon her, and then gone home, with her mind quite ready to learn from any one wiser than herself a better mode of taking her honey. She might have taken a lesson from the Bee-master about whom I am going to tell you, had she been so happy as to know him. An honest Oxfordshire thatcher, who had all his life long kept Bees, and made a C |