ting their pockets from the outside,
and the honey-bee gleans after him, taking the small change he leaves.
In the case of the locust, however, she usually obtains the honey
without the aid of the larger bee.

Speaking of the honey-bee reminds me that the subtle and
sleight-of-hand manner in which she fills her baskets with pollen and
propolis is characteristic of much of Nature's doings. See the bee
going from flower to flower with the golden pellets on her thighs,
slowly and mysteriously increasing in size. If the miller were to take
the toll of the grist he grinds by gathering the particles of flour
from his coat and hat, as he moved rapidly about, or catching them in
his pockets, he would be doing pretty nearly what the bee does. The
little miller dusts herself with the pollen of the flower, and then,
while on the wing, brushes it off with the fine brush on certain of
her feet, and by some jugglery or other catches it in her pollen
basket. One needs to look long and intently to see through the trick.
Pliny says they fill their baskets with their fore feet, and that they
fill their fore feet with their trunks, but it is a much more subtle
operation than this. I have seen the bees come to a meal barrel in
early spring, and to a pile of hardwood sawdust before there was yet
anything in nature for them to work upon, and, having dusted their
coats with the finer particles of the meal or the sawdust, hover on
the wing above the mass till the little legerdemain feat is performed.
Nature fills her baskets by the same sleight-of-hand, and the observer
must be on the alert who would possess her secret. If the ancients had
looked a little closer and sharper, would they ever have believed in
spontaneous generation in the superficial way in which they did; that
maggots, for instance, were generated spontaneously in putrid flesh?
Could they not see the spawn of the blow-flies? Or, if Virgil had been
a real observer of the bees, would he ever have credited, as he
certainly appears to do, the fable of bees originating from the
carcass of a steer? or that on windy days they carried little stones
for ballast? or that two hostile swarms fought each other in the air?
Indeed, the ignorance, or the false science, of the ancient observers,
with regard to the whole subject of bees, is most remarkable; not
false science merely with regard to their more hidden operations, but
with regard to that which is open and patent to all who have eyes