SHERWOOD A BEE'S EYE VIEW 277 



standing as we see them with her oscelH, or do her compound 

 eyes show her a gay mosaic, or is it quite different from anything of 

 which our minds or imaginations can conceive? Will they never 

 tell me how this scene that I love so to watch appears to them? 

 Could their wings make such happy sounds if its beauty were 

 nothing to them, I wonder? 



One morning late in September I looked out and saw nothing 

 of my garden, my hives or my motmtains. A white fog blotted 

 out everything but a few wheel- webs of spiders, strung with pearls, 

 and a dripping branch of a pear tree very near by. An hour or 

 so later I was working in the vegetable garden in front of the hives 

 when I heard a strange, high-pitched sighing in the air. There 

 was nothing visible through the fog but the sound continued, 

 slowly circling about. It was an indescribable soimd such as one 

 might encounter in a dream; a sound so full of despair, so devoid 

 of hope that no one still living could utter it, I thought. It 

 seemed to be all around me in the air, a continuous, slow mourning 

 in one high tone. I had never heard the meaning of the word 

 "lost" so vividly expressed before. As I watched I discerned a 

 bee, and then others wandering through the endless fog in slow, 

 despairing circles. Some of the hives were dimly visible scarcely 

 ten feet away, but the bees were lost in the white air; and there is 

 nothing that lives quite as hopeless as a "social" insect that finds 

 herself alone. To die for her colony is, apparently, a joy, but to 

 be lost from the colony is despair beyond human experience (if 

 an insect feels the despair she seems to express). However strong- 

 ly bound by love or other ties we may be to other human beings, 

 it is not impossible in the nature of things, for one of us to live 

 alone on a desert island. But who can conceive of a honey bee 

 that is not a citizen, that has no country to serve? Only the 

 sound of these slow wings wandering in circles through the blinding 

 fog can suggest to us what that seems to mean. 



