Nor must we forget the bees which are largely kept throughout the Forest, feeding on the heather, leading Fuller to remark that Hampshire produced the best and worst honey in England. The bee-season, as it is called, generally lasts, on account of the heath, a month longer than on the Wiltshire downs. A great quantity of the Old-English mead—medu—is still made, and it is sold at much the same value as with the Old-English, being three or four times the price of common beer, with which it is often drunk. The bees, in fact, still maintain an important place in the popular local bye-laws. Even in Domesday the woods round Eling are mentioned as yearly yielding twelve pounds' weight of honey. As may therefore be expected, when we remember that the whole of England was once called the Honey Island, here, as elsewhere, plenty of provincialisms occur concerning the bees.[1]
The drones are here named "the big bees," the former word being in some parts seldom used. The young are never said to swarm, but "to play," the word taking its origin from their peculiar flight at the time: as Patmore writes,—
"Under the chestnuts new bees are swarming,
Falling and rising like magical smoke."
The caps of straw which are placed over the "bee-pots," to protect them from wet, are known as the "bee-hackles," or "bee-hakes." This is one of those expressive words which is now only found in this form, and that, in the Midland Counties, of "wheat hackling," that is, covering the sheaves with others in a peculiar way, to shelter them from the rain. About
- ↑ By a decree of the Court of Exchequer, in the twenty-sixth year of Elizabeth, the keepers were allowed to take all the honey found in the trees in the Forest.
