Good honey-years are scarce under the changing English skies; yet Nature’s design for the hive-people is obviously to give an unbroken succession of honey-yielding plants throughout the whole spring and summer, and pollen whenever a bright break of sunshine may lure them out of doors. The white-clover is seldom ready until the first week in June; but, from the earliest willows in March until the last of the flowering seed-crops is down in late July, there is abundance of provender, if only the fickle sun will do its part in the matter. The clover, as farming goes nowadays, is the great main source of honey, in southern England at least; but the connoisseurs are at variance as to what yields the absolute perfection of honey. Scotsmen are all of one mind, for a rare chance, in this; and will hear of nothing but the heather, carefully discriminating between the bell-heather, which is good, and the ling-heather, which is immeasurably better. Yet there is a honey, or rather a honey-blend, which far outstrips them all, though it is as rare and almost as priceless as the once famous Comet vintages. It is to be had only when the apple-blossom and the hawthorn come into full flower together, and this is only when a chill April has delayed the one and a summer-like May has forced on the other. Then, to the mellow refinement of the apple-nectar, is added the delicate almond flavour of the hawthorn, and the resulting honey is easily the finest sweetmeat in the world. Wonder is often expressed that one of the most generally cultivated crops, the red-clover, is seldom visited by the honey-bee, although the bumblebees fill it with their deep trombone-music at all times of the day. It is true that the tongue of the hive-bee cannot reach to the bottom of the long red-clover calyx, but this would not deter her if the nectar were worth the gathering. She would cut through the petal at its base, as she does with many other flowers, and so steal an effective march on her better caparisoned rival. But red-clover nectar is poor in consistency and coarse of flavour. When the main crop is in flower, it would yield a practically unlimited amount of honey, but this is just the time when the bee can employ herself more profitably elsewhere. After the red-clover has been cut, a second growth springs up, bearing flower-tubes less developed, and therefore shorter than those of the first crop. But now other and better sources of supply are rapidly failing. The bee—for whom, in prosperous times, nothing but the best is good enough—must revise her tastes to meet her necessities. At this time she is as busy as the rest in the red-clover fields. And when her clearer, sweeter note is heard there, mingling its contralto with the hoarser music of the bumblebee, it is a token that the heyday of the year is past: the honey-chambers must be taken off the hives without delay. CHAPTER XIV THE DRONE AND HIS STORY