us, bumblebees hummed, and finally
some little soft brown bees arrived--surely the ones we wanted.
Cautiously Jonathan approached one, held his box under the goldenrod
clump, brought the glass down slowly from above--and the bee was ours.
She was a gentle little thing, and did not seem to resent her treatment
at all, but dropped down on to the honeycomb and fell to work. Jonathan
had providently cut a three-forked stick, and he now stuck this into the
ground and set the box on the forks so that it was about on a level with
the goldenrod tops. Then he carefully drew off the glass, and we sat
down to watch.

"Shouldn't you think she must have had enough?" I said, after a
while--"Oh! there she comes now!"

Our bee appeared on the edge of the box, staggering heavily. She rubbed
her legs, rubbed her wings, shook herself, girded up her loins, as it
were, and brushed the hair out of her eyes, and finally rose, turning on
herself in a close spiral which widened into larger and larger circles
above the box, and at length, after two or three wide sweeps where we
nearly lost track of her, she darted off in a "bee-line" for a tall
chestnut tree on a knoll to the westward.

"Will she come back?" we wondered. Five minutes--ten--fifteen--it seemed
an hour.

"She must have been a drone," said Jonathan.

"Or maybe she wasn't a honeybee at all," I suggested, gloomily. "She
might be just another kind of hornet--no, look! There she is!"

I could hardly have been more thrilled if my fairy godmother had
appeared on the goldenrod stalk and waved her wand at me. To think that
the bee really did play the game! I knelt and peered in over the side of
the box. Yes, there she was, all six feet in the honey, pumping away
with might and main through her little red tongue, or proboscis, or
whatever it was. We sank back among the weeds and waited for her to go.
As she rose, in the same spirals, and disappeared westward, Jonathan
said, "If she doesn't bring another one back with her this time, we'll
try dropping honey on her back. You wait here and be a landmark for the
bee while I try to catch another one in the other box."

I settled down comfortably under the yellow-top, and instantly I
realized what a pleasant thing it is to be a landmark. For one thing,
when you sit down in a field you get a very different point of view from
that when you stand. Goldenrod is different looked at from beneath, with
sky beyond it; sky is different seen through