“You know best, though beating on tin pots and cans at such a time’s a custom as old as the hills.”

“And vain as many others equally old.  I have a different method to hurry swarming.”

Now they passed over the snows of a million fallen petals, while yet good store of flowers hung upon the trees.  June basked in the heart of the orchard and a delicious green sweetness and freshness marked the moment.  Crimson and cream, all splashed with sunlight, here bloomed against a sky of summer blue, here took a shade from the new-born leaves and a shadow from branch and bough.  To the eye, a mottled, dimpled glory of apple-blossom spread above grey trunks and twisted branches, shone through deep vistas of the orchard, brightened all the distance; while upon the ear, now growing and deepening, arose one sustained and musical susurration of innumerable wings.

“You will be wise to stay here,” said Hicks.  He himself stopped a moment, opened his bag, put on his veil and gloves, and tucked his trousers inside his stockings.

“Not I. I wish to see the hiving.”

Twenty yards distant a play of light and glint and twinkle of many frantic bees converged upon one spot, as stars numerically increase towards the heart of a cluster.  The sky was full of flying insects, and their wings sparkled brightly in the sun; though aloft, with only the blue for background, they appeared as mere dark points filling the air in every direction.  The swarm hung at the very heart of a little glade.  Here two ancient apple-trees stood apart, and from one low bough, stretched at right angles to the parent stem, and not devoid of leaves and blossoms, there depended a grey-brown mass from which a twinkling, flashing fire leaped forth as from gems bedded in the matrix.  Each transparent wing added to the dazzle under direct sunlight; the whole agglomeration of life was in form like a bunch of grapes, and where it thinned away to a point the bees dropped off by their own weight into the grass below, then rose again and either flew aloft in wide and circling flight or rushed headlong upon the swarm once more.  Across the iridescent cluster passed a gleam and glow of peacock and iris, opal and mother-of-pearl; while from its heart ascended a deep murmur, telling of tremendous and accumulated energy suddenly launched into this peaceful glade of apple-blossom and ambient green.  The frenzy of the moment held all that little laborious people.  There was none of the concerted action to be observed at warping, or simultaneous motion of birds in air and fishes in water; but each unit of the shining army dashed on its own erratic orbit, flying and circling, rushing hither and thither, and sooner or later returning to join the queen upon the bough.