that Cochet's ground-stroke equipment is as sound as Lacoste's, or that he possesses the dash and élan of Borotra, which, when the physical penalty is most severe, can yet bring him victory. René Lacoste, twice champion of America, is a living example of what application and persistency can achieve. As a boy he was never robust; you would never have imagined that he would have survived five grueling sets under a fierce midsummer sun. His conquest of the game was long and arduous, even though he is still a young man. He toiled while others rested; he was ever the patient apprentice, studying every tactic, polishing every stroke. It is said that he has an index folio recording the weak and strong points in the equipment of every international player. Like a sea captain navigating strange waters, he examined his chart before every match of importance. By this means he avoided many rocks. The voyage might be tempestuous; he reached harbor serenely. Lacoste has made good entirely by his own efforts; his character is a fine one; he is a worthy champion of America as of France.

Jean Borotra comes of very different stock. Bred in the Basque country, he has the volatile nature of its uplands. Dauntless before danger, whether it be on a lawn-tennis court or in an aeroplane, or even when he is late for some social or business engagement, he will take every conceivable risk; yet his buoyancy and optimism will win through. His defeat on successive days of Vincent Richards and W. M. Johnston in the American championship of 1926 and both his adversaries were favored by the quidnuncs to win was but one of his many brilliant exploits in big events. He has won at Wimbledon twice, and but for cruel fortune should have won again last year. He invades Australia and con

quers the Commonwealth both on the court and off. While the Australian championship is in progress he spends two nights in the train; yet he wins all three national events, though separated from defeat by only a few points.

He and Jacques Brugnon, with Christian Boussus also a member of the team, have just concluded a world tour. They have been popular everywhere, in Buenos Aires as in Wellington, in Melbourne as in Johannesburg. They have not escaped defeat in individual matches; as a team they have only lost one test, and that was on landing at Durban after a long sea voyage. It was an innovation for Frenchmen to travel round the world armed with tennis rackets. Englishmen had done so and so had Americans, but this was the first organized mission of nonEnglish-speaking players. That in Australia alone the invaders should have enriched the treasury of the Austra lian Lawn Tennis Association to the extent of $80,000, permitting the tourists to receive $17,500, the maximum sum arranged to cover their expenses, is a striking tribute to the popularity of M. Borotra and his comrades. Like Cæsar, they came, saw, and conquered.

France was eminently fortunate in her leader. No better ambassador, expressing the courage and vivacity of his race, could have been chosen. M. Borotra was a source of perennial inspiration to his team, and since his social charms were marked, and his wit as a speaker ingratiating, he made an ideal captain. Good captains are as valuable in sport as in industry or war; and the leadership of France in lawn tennis has been constructed to a large extent on mental equipment.

One must not forget the influence of Mlle. Lenglen on the rising fortunes of France. Her name became a household word long before France won the Davis

Cup or her male players triumphed at Wimbledon or Forest Hills. She was the first Gallic invader to win a singles title at Wimbledon, and she won it at the age of twenty under dramatic circumstances, with the King and Queen and packed galleries in attendance, snatching victory from defeat, proving to the world at large that France possessed the will to conquer. Her successive triumphs on the centre court, each more conducive than the last, emphasized this truth. They did more; it was demonstrated to the Continental invader, bred on a non-turf surface, that the grass plane permitted the best expression of a refined art. Fluency of footwork, at which the French excel, reveled in the lighter and easier tread, the softer carpet for swift toe work. The delicate volley, the application of check or slice, the strokes that satisfied finesse rather than force-these were better dis played on green and yielding turf.

If the influence of Suzanne Lenglen on French psychology was striking and permanent, so were the methods by which she achieved success. They were orthodox methods, those of past masters, like the Dohertys. There was nothing transitory or freakish about her stroke action; the style was easy, without effort. Had Mlle. Lenglen been a specialist in one stroke, rather than the mistress of all strokes, she would not have left such a deep imprint on the game. The fact that her repertoire was complete left no opening for the dissenting voice. She became a standard by which the play of others could be judged. Incidentally, she revolutionized the deportment of women on court. Instead of the conventional stride she made the hurdler's leap. This characteristic was born in her childhood years. She could not run like the adult; she had to jump. Her style became moulded on the new

mobility; it was a style that made a servant of acrobatics, a style that introduced a new cult. The advent of this cult synchronized with the emancipatory ardor experienced by women of all nations after the World War. They discarded their primness, their reserve of motion, as they discarded their long skirts. Mlle. Lenglen was French, but her example was world-wide. She may not participate again in competitive lawn tennis, although she is still comparatively young; that fact will not lower her position in the annals of the game. The French ascendancy dates from her first championship; the wide development of women's lawn tennis throughout the world has followed it.

The French owe much to their organizers. It is always difficult, in the direction of sport, to mix new blood with old. Without this diffusion there is a risk of a too arrogant conservatism, of old players, now out of harness, failing to keep step with the new steeds. That they should give the benefit of their ripe experience in counsel is indispensable; but any autocracy in sport is fatal, for young people who play games thrive on the direct encouragement of those who have achieved deeds in the sight of the juniors. The old champion cannot inspire the young unless he is companionable, unless he can talk the language of youth. The French would seem to have realized this truth. They have incorporated young men into their controlling body. Their clubs are organized with a view to tending budding talent. The athlete is not lost in the lawn-tennis player; there is a running-and-jumping track in addition to the courts. Do not imagine that athleticism has to be imposed on the French; the sport is there to be cultivated. The Government wisely nurses it, for there is no better antidote to communism than a healthy ambition to excel in sport.

I

WHEN you walk into a grocery store and look about you upon all the wondrous works of God, your mind must linger often upon the honey. For those who prefer it in the comb, the bees have put it up in one-pound sections, all neatly built into frames of basswood four and a quarter inches square. For those who might want to buy the sweetness without the wax, and are willing to forgo the privilege of having those delicate cells break inwardly upon the tongue, it comes clear and beautiful in a bottle. In either form it is delightful; though, as for me, I have always felt that honey is a work that is worthy of a frame.

In order to get the bees to produce honey for him, man must proceed by taking the measure of the bee. It has been found that the thickness of a working bee of the standard strain is 163 of an inch, that being the width of opening she can pass through without discomfort. A somewhat ampler and freer fit, to be used in parts of the hive where more freedom is allowable, is from three sixteenths to three eighths of an inch; but nowhere in the brood department must this latter measurement be exceeded.

If a swarm of bees were allowed to conduct a hive according to their own notions, they would do about everything that a man does not want. Their principal concern in life is the raising of young; consequently honeycomb, in a state of nature, is filled with bee life

in every stage of development from the egg to the full-grown insect. Some cells will contain the eggs, almost microscopically small; others little white worms; others big fat grubs; others quiescent nymphs or pupæ; still others the stores of pollen or flower dust upon which the young are fed. Others, again, contain the supply of honey for present and future needs; and it is this sort of indiscriminate mixture that drips from the paw of the bear and constitutes the sort of meal that a bear likes to sit down to. But it is hardly the sort of honey that the grocer would offer to a customer.

163

1000

A hive, therefore, is built with upper and lower stories. In the lower story the bees are allowed to manage their affairs somewhat as they would in a state of nature, while the upper part is to receive the clear, broodless honey for the use of man. A screen of sheet zinc having oblong holes of an inch in width, or a grid of smooth wires accurately spaced, is usually placed between the two stories. This arrangement permits the workers to pass upward with their loads of nectar while it prevents the passage of the bigger-bodied queen when she goes on a quest for more cells to lay eggs in. The result is obvious. With no eggs going into the upper story, there will be no little white worms, no big fat grubs, no nascent nymphs, and no store of special food for the feeding of the young; and the clear comb honey will be fit to grace the big cut-glass bowl and attract to its scintillating self all the

finer allusions of the grace before

meat.

In modern practice the zinc excluder, with its sharp edges burred by the die, is being displaced by the grid of smooth wire which does not wear out the bee's wings so quickly, and consequently affords a bigger yield of honey. In this case the spacing is but of an inch, 168% and most ingenious means are used to space the wires so accurately.

This standard opening in the queen excluder, while it serves such a useful function in honey production, is, nevertheless, among the less important of the measurements used in the management of the bee. Far more fundamental is what is known as the 'bee space,' a measurement ranging from three sixteenths to three eighths of an inch, beyond which limits error must not go. The bee space, the basic secret in hive building, was discovered in this country in 1852. Its exact limits were determined, not by the simple means of measuring a bee's body, but by experiment with the nature and psychology of the bee at work. Its importance is such that it has worked a world-wide revolution in hive building and in methods of beekeeping.

Up to the year 1852, man had no practical means to regulate and control the interior economy of a beehive. It was a closed world to the beekeeper; he could only enter it and take his share by killing the bees with sulphur, or by turning it upside down and acting as an invader and destroyer. This was because the modern hive with movable combs had not been invented; and this is but another way of saying that the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a Congregational minister who loved both bees and men, had not yet appeared upon the scene. He not only discovered the principle, but he devised the hive which gave it practical and permanent application. All other inven

tions pertaining to the hive, such as the queen excluder, are subsequent and secondary in their nature; for, without the movable-comb hive itself, they would be useless.

This measurement and principle called a bee space affects honey production in so many ways, and ramifies the discipline of the hive to such an extent, that it may be said to comprise the whole art of bee management. A little explanation of the fundamental facts of bee life will make this easily understood. And moreover it will help us appreciate the life work of a man about whom the public knows too little.

II

Nature did not intend a swarm of bees to produce a great surplus of honey over and above the amount needed to raise their young, found new colonies, and support them through the greater part of the year. In the few short weeks of honey flow, the bees must hurry in enough to last them through all the flowerless months of fall and winter and spring; and so great is the rush of life with them, in periods when the nectar is coming, that they work themselves to death almost as rapidly as new generations can be raised. If man wants them to lay by a considerable extra store for his own use, he must make certain changes in their way of life.

First, he must relieve them of the task of making wax and shaping it into cells. To make one pound of wax, bees must use from seven to fifteen pounds of honey, eating and digesting it and extruding it from their bodies in the form of wax scales. Wax is a form of animal oil or fat, and it takes a great deal of food to make a little fat. While doing this, great numbers of bees hang inert from the roof of the hive; so that, in making material for comb building,

they not only consume a great deal of honey, but they lose time during which they might otherwise be working afield and bringing in more nectar. There is here a loss in two directions.

Second, he must see to it that the colony does not produce the thousands of drones which nature prompts it to nurse and nurture and support in adult idleness. These shining gentlemen of leisure could not gather nectar and pollen even if they had a mind to, for nature has not provided them with the special bodily parts needed in such work. They live upon the honey which the other bees bring in and deposit in the cells. Their life is a pleasant one while it lasts. They hang about the entrance of the hive, taking the sun and making idle excursions in the most inviting hours of the day. It has been estimated that it takes the labor of six working bees to support one healthy drone. And yet the bees are inclined to raise them in great numbers. If this were all, it would not be so bad; but every drone that is hatched and raised requires the use of one of those waxen cradles or cells, which, if it were not being occupied by a drone, would serve to produce a worker. The drone not only consumes honey himself, but he reduces the number of bees that are making it. Besides this, when he is not basking outside in good weather, he is cumbering the surface of the combs and getting in the way; and thus the raising of drones, like the making of wax, involves loss in several directions. Certainly, if man is to have much honey for himself, he must contrive a way to keep the queen from laying so many drone eggs.

Third, he must keep the bees from 'swarming.' Bees have an instinct which prompts them, at the height of a honey flow, to subdivide their community, sending out a delegation to establish a new colony. The greater part of

the swarm, consisting of the older working bees and the queen, will be seized with the moving fever; and some day when the weather is just right they will make their exodus to the promised land, leaving behind only enough bees to tend the thousands of young in their cradles and give a proper start to the new generation that will inherit the hive. The absconders, settling first on a near-by bush or tree, and making sure that the queen is with them, strike out for some hollow tree or other suitable habitation; and, once started, they will never turn back, no matter what fortune may befall them. They have made their last will and testament, leaving all to the children, and there is no danger that the old hive, with its accumulated riches of honey and its complete furniture of comb, will ever see them again.

Having parted with everything, they must now start the world all over again, like Robinson Crusoe or Adam; and this is a most strenuous and risky undertaking when you consider that a bee can do nothing in a home without furniture, and that all her prosperity depends upon the weather. We have already seen that this furniture costs a great deal in time and effort, to say nothing of the honey that must be laid by. In the new home the bees will have to work hard while the honey flow is on to get enough comb built and enough nectar stored away to keep the colony over winter. At best they will hardly have more than enough to last them; and as for the depleted swarm that they left behind, they will have to increase and multiply, starting with a new queen; and the newly hatched bees will have to improve each shining hour if they are going into winter with a big, warm cluster of bees and sufficient food to support the population.

From the standpoint of a bee owner, this habit of swarming is unnecessary