The cellars are still, dark, and fragrant. Forty-eight great oval-shaped butts, ten feet in diameter, holding 2,100 gallons each, I counted in one cellar. The butts are made of Michigan oak, and have a fine yellow color, which contrasts well with the red stream of the wine when it is drawn.
Notwithstanding the increase of the grape culture, the price of grapes is advancing, some estimates making it forty per cent higher than it was five years ago. It is a quicker and probably a more repaying industry than orange-growing. It is reckoned that a vineyard in its fourth year will produce two tons to the acre; in the seventh year, four; the fourth year it will be profitable, reckoning the cost of the vineyard at sixty dollars an acre, exclusive of the first cost of the land. The annual expense of cultivation, picking, and handling is about twenty-five dollars. The rapid increase of this culture has been marvellous. In 1848 there were only 200,000 vines in all California; in 1862 there were 9,500,000; in 1881, 64,000,000, of which at least 34,000,000 are in full bearing.
Such facts and figures are distressing to the advocates of total abstinence; but they may take heart in the thought that a by no means insignificant proportion of these grapes will be made into raisins, canned, or eaten fresh.
The raisin crop was estimated at 160,000 boxes for 1881. Many grape-growers believe that in raisin-making will ultimately be found the greatest profit. The Americans are a raisin-eating people. From Malaga alone are imported annually into the United States about ten tons of raisins, one half the entire crop of the Malaga raisin district. This district has an area of only about four hundred square miles. In California an area of at least twenty thousand square miles is adapted to the raisin.
A moderate estimate of the entire annual grape crop of California is 119,000 tons. "Allowing 60,000 tons to be used in making wines, 2,000 tons to be sent fresh to the Eastern States, and 5,000 tons to be made into raisins, there would still remain 52,000 tons to be eaten fresh or wasted,—more than one hundred pounds for each resident of California, including children."[1]
The California wines are as yet of inferior quality. A variety of still wines and three champagnes are made; but even the best are looked on with distrust and disfavor by connoisseurs, and until they greatly improve they will not command a ready market in America. At present it is to be feared that a large proportion of them are sold under foreign labels.
Prominent among the minor industries is honey-making. From the great variety of flowers and their spicy flavor, especially from the aromatic sages, the honey is said to have a unique and delicious taste, resembling that of the famous honey of Hymettus.
The crop for 1881, in the four southern counties, was estimated at three millions of pounds; a statistic that must seem surprising to General Fremont, who, in his report to Congress of explorations on the Pacific coast in 1844, stated that the honey-bee could not exist west of the Sierra Nevadas.
The bee ranches are always picturesque; they are usually in cañons or on wooded foot-hills, and their villages of tiny bright-colored hives look like gay Lilliputian encampments. It has appeared to me that men becoming guardians of bees acquire a peculiar calm philosophy, and are superior to other farmers and outdoor workers. It would not seem unnatural that the profound respect they are forced to entertain for insects so small and so wholly at their mercy should give them enlarged standards in many things; above all, should breed in them a fine and just humility toward all creatures.
A striking instance of this is to be seen in one of the most beautiful cañons of the San Gabriel valley, where, living in a three-roomed, redwood log cabin, with a vine-covered booth in front, is an old man kings might envy.
He had a soldier's warranty deed for one hundred and sixty acres of land, and he elected to take his estate at the head of a brook-swept gorge, four fifths precipice and rock. In the two miles between his cabin and the mouth of the gorge, the trail and the brook change sides sixteen times. When the brook is at its best, the trail goes under altogether, and there is no getting up or down the cañon. Here, with a village of bees for companions, the old man has lived for a dozen years. While the bees are off at work, he sits at home and weaves, out of the gnarled stems and roots of manzanita and laurels, curious baskets, chairs, and brackets, for which he finds ready market in Los Angeles. He knows every tree and shrub in the cañon, and has a fancy for collecting specimens of all the native woods of the region. These he shapes into paper-cutters, and polishes them till they are like satin. He came from Ohio forty years ago, and has lived in a score of States. The only spot he likes as well as this gorge is Don Yana, on the Rio Grande River, in Mexico. Sometimes he hankers to go there and sit under the shadow of big oaks, where the land slopes down to the river; but "the bee business," he says, "is a good business only for a man who has the gift of continuance;" and "it's no use to try to put bees with farms: farms want valleys, bees want mountains."
"There are great back-draws to the bee business, the irregularities of the flowers being chief; some years there's no honey in the flowers at all. Some explain it on one hypothesis and some on another, and it lasts them to quarrel over."
His phrases astonish you; also the quiet courtesy of his manner, so at odds with his backwoodsman's garb. But presently you learn that he began life as a lawyer, has been a judge in his time; and when, to show his assortment of paper-cutters, he lifts down the big book they are kept in, and you see that it is Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary," you understand how his speech has been fashioned. He keeps a diary of every hive, the genealogy of every swarm.
"No matter what they do,—the least thing,—we note it right down in the book. That's the only way to learn bees," he says.
On the outside wall of the cabin is fastened an observation hive, with glass sides. Here he sits, watch in hand, observing and noting; he times the bees, in and out, and in each one of their operations. He watches the queen on her bridal tour in the air; once the drone bridegroom fell dead on his note-book. "I declare I couldn't help feeling sort of sorry for him," said the old man.
In a shanty behind the house is the great honey-strainer, a marvellous invention, which 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.