The Busy Bee. 195 



green, red, black, or blue grains. A dog likes butter, 

 but he will turn from it with loathing if that is all he has 

 to eat. He would starve on it alone. So a bee loves 

 honey, but while it is a force-making food as good as 

 butter, the bee needs a flesh-forming food, which pollen 

 is. The dust sticks in the fur with which the bee is cov- 

 ered, but most of it is gathered in the market-baskets it 

 carries on its legs, which it packs full and scrapes out 

 into the comb-cells when it gets back home. 



When we speak of the bee sucking honey it must be 

 understood that it is not quite the same thing as our suck- 

 ing cider through a straw. If we had to go from mo- 

 lasses barrel to molasses barrel, our straw would soon 

 clog up. We can throw it away, but the bee must keep 

 her tongue. Some \vill tell you it is a tube. Don't you 

 believe them. It is more like a trough, down which 

 saliva runs to thin the gummy nectar. The bee prac- 

 tically laps honey as a cat laps milk, dabbling the hairy 

 end here and there to sop up the tiny specks of sweet of 

 which the flowers are often stingy. So fine is the stream 

 sometimes that a one-pound section box represents six 

 hundred miles of it. 



I wish I might tell you about the bee's tongue, if you 

 had the time to rejoice with me over its marvels; I wish 

 we could study together the wonderful antennae with 

 which the bee smells and hears; the curious compound 

 eyes, in each of whose sixty-three hundred facets one 

 may see with a good microscope the perfect image of 

 one's hand opening and shutting the fingers; its breath- 

 ing tubes that ventilate its body; its stomach, with the 

 pretty four-leaved valve; its wings, its feet any one of 

 the organs of its body which have been so marvelously 

 fashioned out of jelly by the hands of Circumstance and 

 Necessity. But I cannot. I shall have done well if I in- 



