ing
and pouring upon the flowery ground in a tremulous, shifting mosaic, as
the light-ways in the leafy wall open and close with the swaying
breeze--shining leaves and flowers, birds and bees, mingling together in
springtime harmony, and soothing fragrance exhaling from a thousand
thousand fountains! In these balmy, dissolving days, when the deep
heart-beats of Nature are felt thrilling rocks and trees and everything
alike, common business and friends are happily forgotten, and even the
natural honey-work of bees, and the care of birds for their young, and
mothers for their children, seem slightly out of place.

To the northward, in Humboldt and the adjacent counties, whole hillsides
are covered with rhododendron, making a glorious melody of bee-bloom in
the spring. And the Western azalea, hardly less flowery, grows in massy
thickets three to eight feet high around the edges of groves and woods
as far south as San Luis Obispo, usually accompanied by manzanita; while
the valleys, with their varying moisture and shade, yield a rich variety
of the smaller honey-flowers, such as mentha, lycopus, micromeria,
audibertia, trichostema, and other mints; with vaccinium, wild
strawberry, geranium, calais, and goldenrod; and in the cool glens along
the stream-banks, where the shade of trees is not too deep, spiraea,
dog-wood, heteromeles, and calycanthus, and many species of rubus form
interlacing tangles, some portion of which continues in bloom for
months.

Though the coast region was the first to be invaded and settled by white
men, it has suffered less from a bee point of view than either of the
other main divisions, chiefly, no doubt, because of the unevenness of
the surface, and because it is owned and protected instead of lying
exposed to the flocks of the wandering "sheepmen." These remarks apply
more particularly to the north half of the coast. Farther south there is
less moisture, less forest shade, and the honey flora is less varied.

The Sierra region is the largest of the three main divisions of the
bee-lands of the State, and the most regularly varied in its
subdivisions, owing to their gradual rise from the level of the Central
Plain to the alpine summits. The foot-hill region is about as dry and
sunful, from the end of May until the setting in of the winter rains, as
the plain. There are no shady forests, no damp glens, at all like those
lying at the same elevations in the Coast Mountains. The social
compositae o