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.