"I would most earnestly beg the aid of the clergy and resident gentry, but, above all, their good wives; in a word, of all who wish to help the poor who dwell round about them in a far humbler way, yet perhaps not less happily; I would beg them, one and all, to aid me as an united body, in teaching their poor neighbours the best way of keeping Bees. Many people think the poor may be helped most by giving them small allotments of land. I think this may do much; and I will, whenever I am able, help on this plan. But much difficulty is often found in getting land; and I do not think it is so certain or so safe a way of doing good, as by giving a poor man a stock of Bees, and then showing him how to take care of them, and to profit by them; for digging is thirsty work, and the beer-shop often stands hard by the allotment: so, although the labourer after his daily toil may go by himself to his plot of ground, yet he is very likely to find one or two gardeners, thirsty like himself, to walk home with him, but before they get there to drop into the beer-shop; and when once there, snugly seated in the chimney corner, neither I, nor, what is worse, their poor wives, can tell when they will get out of it. But a row of Bees keeps a man at home: all his spare moments may be well filled by tending them, by watching their wondrous ways, and by loving them. In winter he may work in his own chimney corner, at making Hives both for himself and to sell. This he will find almost as profitable as his Bees, for well-made Hives always meet a ready sale. Again, his Bee-hives are close to his cottage door; he will learn to like their sweet music better than the dry squeaking of a pot-house fiddle, and he may listen to it in the free open air, with his wife and children about him. They will be to him a countless family. He will be sure to love them if he cares for them, and they will love him too, and repay all his pains. Many a lesson a man and his wife may teach their children at the mouth of their Hives; for a Bee-garden is only second to a Sunday-school."—Preface, xliii.
Although our author has made, and apparently without effort, a most amusing book, his objects, observable in every page, seem the benefit of the cottager and the welfare of the bee, rather than the amusement of the reader. He insists most strenuously on the worse that inutility of killing the bees; maintaining at great length, and with sound reasoning too, that it is not merely more humane but more profitable to save their lives. The substitute for killing is intoxicating the bees: this is accomplished by filling the hive with the smoke of an ignited puff-ball. "You may find in the damp meadows a fungus which children call frogs' cheese and puff balls. When quite ripe if you pinch them a dirty powder like smoke will come out. Pick them when half ripe. The largest are the best, and they often grow to the size of a man's head. Put them in a bag, and when you have squeezed them to half the size, dry them in an oven after the bread is drawn, or before the fire." When dried, this fungus will burn like tinder: it is to be put by, and when required for use "you should get a little tin box fitted to the nose of your bellows, having a sort of spout coming from it which fits the door of your beehive. Take a piece of fungus twice the size of a hen's egg, light it, and when it burns freely
