would drive bees mad with despair if they could understand it. Into a wheel, with perforated spokes, is slipped the comb full of honey, the cells being first opened with a hot knife. By the swift turning of this wheel, the honey flies out of the comb, and pours through a cylinder into a can underneath, leaving the comb whole and uninjured, ready to be put back into the hive for the patient robbed bees to fill again. The receiving-can will hold fifteen hundred pounds; two men can fill it in a day; a single comb is so quickly drained that a bee might leave his hive on his foraging expedition, and before he could get his little load of honey and return, the comb could be emptied and put back. It would be vastly interesting to know what is thought and said in bee-hives about these mysterious emptyings of combs.
A still more tyrannical circumvention has been devised, to get extra rations of honey from bees: false combs, wonderful imitations of the real ones, are made of wax. Apparently the bees know no difference; at any rate, they fill the counterfeit full of real honey. These artificial combs, carefully handled, will last ten or twelve years in continual use.
The highest yield his hives had ever given him was one hundred and eighty pounds a hive.
"That's a good yield; at that rate, with three or four hundred hives, I'd do very well," said the old man. "But you're at the mercy of speculators in honey as well as everything else. I never count on getting more than four or five cents a pound. They make more than I do."
The bee has a full year's work in South California: from March to August inexhaustible forage, and in all the other months plenty to do,—no month without some blossoms to be found. His time of danger is when apricots are ripe and lady-bugs fly.
Of apricots, bees will eat till they are either drunk or stuffed to death; no one knows which. They do not live to get home. Oddly enough, they cannot pierce the skins themselves, but have to wait till the lady-bug has made a hole for them. It must have been an accidental thing in the outset, the first bee's joining a lady-bug at her feast of apricot. The bee, in his turn, is an irresistible treat to the bee-bird and lizard, who pounce upon him when he is on the flower; and to a stealthy moth, who creeps by night into hives and kills hundreds.
"Nobody need think the bee business is all play," was our old philosopher's last word. "It's just like everything else in life, and harder than some things."
The sheep industry is, on the whole, decreasing in California. In 1876, the wool crop of the entire State was 28,000 tons; in 1881, only 21,500. This is the result, in part, of fluctuations in the price of wool, but more of the growing sense of the greater certainty of increase from agriculture and horticulture.
The cost of keeping a sheep averages only $1.25 a year. Its wool sells for $1.50, and for each hundred there will be forty-five lambs, worth seventy-five cents each. But there have been droughts in California which have killed over one million sheep in a year; there is always, therefore, the risk of losing in one year the profits of many.
The sheep ranches are usually desolate places: a great stretch of seemingly bare lands, with a few fenced corrals, blackened and foul-smelling; the home and out-buildings clustered together in a hollow or on a hill-side where there is water; the less human the neighborhood the better.
The loneliness of the life is, of itself, a salient objection to the industry. Of this the great owners need know nothing; they can live where they like. But for the small sheepmen, the shepherds, and, above all, the herders, it is a terrible life,—how terrible is shown by the frequency of insanity among herders. Sometimes, after only a few months of the life, a herder goes suddenly mad. After learning this fact, it is no longer possible to see the picturesque side of the effective groups one so often comes on suddenly in the wildernesses: sheep peacefully grazing, and the shepherd lying on the ground watching them, or the whole flock racing in a solid, fleecy, billowy scamper up or down a steep hill-side, with the dogs leaping and barking on all sides at once. One scans the shepherd's face alone, with pitying fear lest he may be losing his wits.
A shearing at a large sheep ranch is a grand sight. We had the good fortune to see one at Baldwin's, at La Puente. Three thousand sheep had been sheared the day before, and they would shear twenty-five hundred on this day.
A shed sixty feet long by twenty-five wide, sides open; small pens full of sheep surrounding it on three sides; eighty men bent over at every possible angle, eighty sheep being tightly held in every possible position, eighty shears flashing, glancing, clipping; bright Mexican eyes shining, laughing Mexican voices jesting. At first it seemed only a confused scene of phantasmagoria. As our eyes became familiarized, the confusion disentangled itself, and we could note the splendid forms of the men and their marvellous dexterity in using the shears. Less than five minutes it took from the time a sheep was grasped, dragged in, thrown down, seized by the shearer's knees, till it was set free, clean shorn, and its three-pound fleece tossed on a table outside. A good shearer shears seventy or eighty sheep in a day; men of extra dexterity shear a hundred. The Indians are famous for skill at shearing, and in all their large villages are organized shearing-bands, with captains, that go from ranch to ranch in the shearing-season. There were a half-dozen Indians lying on the ground outside this shearing-shed at Puente, looking on wistfully. The Mexicans had crowded them out for that day, and they could get no chance to work.
A pay clerk stood in the centre of the shed with a leathern wallet full of five-cent pieces. As soon as a man had sheared his sheep, he ran to the clerk, fleece in hand, threw down the fleece, and received his five-cent piece. In one corner of the shed was a barrel of beer, which was retailed at five cents a glass; and far too many of the five-cent pieces changed hands again the next minute at the beer barrel. As fast as the fleeces were tossed out from the shed, they were thrown up to a man standing on the top of the roof. This man flung them into an enormous bale-sack, swinging wide-mouthed from a derrick; in the sack stood another man, who jumped on the wool to pack it down tight.
As soon as the shearers perceived that their pictures were being drawn by the artist in our party, they were all agog; by twos and threes they left their work and crowded around the carriage, peering, commenting, asking to have their portraits taken, quizzing those whose features they recognized; it was like Italy rather than America. One tattered fellow, whose shoeless feet were tied up in bits of gunny-bags, was distressed because his trousers were too short. "Would the gentleman kindly make them in the drawing a little farther down his legs? It was an accident they were so short." All were ready to pose and stand, even in the most difficult attitudes, as long as was required. Those who had done so asked, like children, if their names could not be put in the book; so I wrote them all down: "Juan Canero, Juan Rivera, Felipe Ybara, José Jesus Lopez, and Domingo Garcia." The space they will fill is a little thing to give; and there is a satisfaction in the good faith of printing them, though the shearers will most assuredly never know it.
The faces of the sheep being shorn were piteous; not a struggle, not a bleat, the whole of their unwillingness and terror being written in their upturned eyes. "As a sheep before her shearers is dumb" will always have for me a new significance.
The shepherd in charge of the Puente ranch is an Italian named Gaetano. The porch of his shanty was wreathed with vines and blossoms, and opened on a characteristic little garden, half garlic, the other half pinks and geraniums. As I sat there looking out on the scene, he told me of a young man who had come from Italy to be herder for him, and who had gone mad and shot himself.
"Three go crazy last year," he said. "Dey come home, not know noting. You see, never got company for speak at all."
This young boy grew melancholy almost at once, was filled with abnormal fears of the coyotes, and begged for a pistol to shoot them with. "He want my pistol. I not want give. I say, You little sick; you stay home in house; I send oder man. My wife she go town buy clothes for baptism one baby got. He get pistol in drawer while she gone." They found him lying dead with his catechism in one hand and the pistol in the other. As Gaetano finished
