hum. Then I found myself in the thick
of a copse of witch-hazel up and down the stems of which the bees were
wildly buzzing. There was no dew left on the bushes, so it was not
that they were after; on looking more closely I saw that they were
crawling down the stems to the little burrs containing the seed of last
fall's flowering. Holding to the top of the burr with their hind legs
they seemed to drink head down from out of the base of the burr.

Picking one of these, I found a hole at its base, and inside, instead
of seeds, a hollow filled with plant lice or aphides, that the bees
were milking. Here were big black ants, too, and yellow wasps drinking
from the same pail.

But a bee's tongue, delicate as it is, would crush a fragile plant
louse. I picked another burr, squeezing it gently, when there issued
from the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, held in the
thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted and found sweet. In burr after
burr I found these sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides for
the bees to puncture and drain. The largest of them would fill a bee
at a draught. Some of the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetle
unknown to me,--the creature that had eaten the seeds, bored the hole
at the base, and left the burr cleaned and garnished for the aphides.
These in turn invited the bees, and the bees, carrying this "honey-dew"
home, mixed it with the pure nectar of the flowers and spoiled the crop.

Can you put stoppers into these millions of honey-dew jugs? Can you
command your bees to avoid these dire bushes and drink only of the
wells at the bottoms of the white-clover tubes? Hardly that, but you
can clip the wing of your queen and make her obedient; you can command
the colony not to swarm, not to waste its strength in drones, and you
can tell it where and how to put this affected honey so that the pure
crop is not spoiled; you can order the going out and coming in of those
many thousands so that every one is a faithful, wise, and efficient
servant, gathering the fragrance and sweet of the summer from every
bank whereon the clover and the wild mints blow.

Small things these for a man with anything to do? Small indeed, but
demanding large love and insight, patience, foresight, and knowledge.
It does not follow that a man who can handle a colony of bees can rule
his spirit or take a city, but the virtues absolutely necessary to the
bee-keeper are those required for the guiding