208 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



Others have managed to get their honey without ball 

 or dust. We do not see them now searching for 

 pollen, as they did in March. It is an extra, deeply 

 necessary, but so thrown at them by the flowers as to 

 be not worth troubling about. The honey is the 

 thing sought the pollen is added unto them. Pollen 

 will not keep except at the bottom of a honey-cell. 

 It is excellent summer provender, and without it 

 neither can brood be raised, nor can summer work be 

 sustained. There are always grains of it in the clear- 

 est honey, there by a kind of accident, and adding no 

 little to its staminal qualities. To the solitary bee it 

 is more important than honey because immediate 

 eating by the young is the only question. If any one 

 has dug up the nest of an Anthophom whose grub 

 has not hatched, and whose store of pollen has gone 

 bad, he has never come upon greater nastiness of its 

 size. This is manna which must be eaten to-day, and 

 the needs of the next day gathered to-morrow. 



In their wise way our hive-bees know all about 

 the keeping of honey, and pollen too. The honey is 

 not just bucketed and sealed, but fanned and warmed 

 and cooled, fermented with the right, but not the 

 wrong, fermentation, preserved with a dash of formic 

 acid, and sealed just in the right condition. We hope 

 there is joy in these chemical niceties, but surely 

 there is joy in the gathering of the honey-flow. The 

 under sides of the green lime boughs are a mass of 

 golden stars that beckon you from the sunshine into 

 the indigo shadows, out of the dry sunlight into the 

 moist fragrance of honey temples, out of what breezes 

 may blow into a calm that is soon made musical with 

 humming. Every leaf seems to have become a bell, 



