NATURE'S CRAFTSMEN 



therefrom. Away our bee mother flies, her body 

 aquiver with maternal eagerness to fill the cradle that 

 her hands have made. Her course is not to the rose- 

 garden now. She is off to the fallow fields where the 

 golden-rod bends with pollen, and asters blue and white, 

 and many wild flowers besides, are holding up their nectar 

 cups for their winged visitors to sip. What a chalice, 

 and what a draught is hers! And as she flutters from 

 flower to flower, and quaffs an elixir that only Flora 

 can mix, she drinks not as the wine-bibber, for the self- 

 ish pleasure of the draught, but mingles therewith the 

 spicery of motherhood's kind thoughts; for from this 

 honey of the flowers, mixed and kneaded with pollen, 

 she will make a rare confection known as '' bee-bread." 

 A tiny roll of this she will put within the cell, will drop 

 thereinto a minute atom of life from her ovaries, then 

 seal up her casket and hie away again to her harvest- 

 field of rose-leaves, and begin to frame another cell. 

 And so on, until death stays her beautiful career or her 

 ovaries have spent their life-force. 



How many of these cells she makes I do not know; 

 but they are commonly found in tubes wherein as many 

 as five or six are sometimes united. However, Professor 

 Putnam, an admirable observer, records that he watched 

 one worker for twenty days building and provisioning 

 her cells underneath a board. There were thirty cells 

 in all, in nine irregular rows, and he estimated that 

 more than a thousand leaf-cuttings had been used by 

 the little architect. 



What an ingenious creature! And how admirable 

 her work! And she and her numberless fellows, in 

 forms and varieties innumerable, over all this land- 

 scape and throughout the universe, are at work upon 



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