but there is spirit and character in
it. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when at
a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake. Bread
with honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good fortune. It is
not black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the same class of goods
as Herrick's

"Nut-brown mirth and russet wit."

How the bees love it, and they bring the delicious odor of the blooming
plant to the hive with them, so that in the moist warm twilight the
apiary is redolent with the perfume of buckwheat.

Yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower that attracts
the bees; they pay no attention to the sweet-scented lilac, or to
heliotrope, but work upon sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon.
In September they are hard pressed, and do well if they pick up enough
sweet to pay the running expenses of their establishment. The purple
asters and the golden-rod are about all that remain to them.

Bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey, but it is a great
advantage to move the hive near the good pasturage, as has been the
custom from the earliest times in the Old World. Some enterprising
person, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient Egyptians, who had
floating apiaries on the Nile, has tried the experiment of floating
several hundred colonies north on the Mississippi, starting from New
Orleans and following the opening season up, thus realizing a sort of
perpetual May or June, the chief attraction being the blossoms of the
river willow, which yield honey of rare excellence. Some of the bees
were no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin honey secured must
have been very great. In September they should have begun the return
trip, following the retreating summer South.

It is the making of the wax that costs with the bee. As with the poet,
the form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet that
fills it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb in
both cases. The honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax he must
make himself--must evolve from his own inner consciousness. When wax
is to be made the wax-makers fill themselves with honey and retire into
their chamber for private meditation; it is like some solemn religious
rite; they take hold of hands, or hook themselves together in long lines
that hang in festoons from the top of the hive, and wait for the miracle
to transpire. After about twenty-f