THE BEE IN WINTER 



AT about the end of October, flower and bee bid one 

 another good-bye for a long, cold, and dreary while. 

 It will always be another flower that keeps the 

 appointment sallow catkin instead of hawkweed, 

 red dead-nettle instead of rag-wort, colt's-foot instead 

 of ivy bloom. Usually, it is a different bee, but the 

 most worthy members of the bee tribe are wont 

 to keep the rendezvous that they themselves as 

 individuals have made. The great humble-bees, un- 

 skilled misers, simply go fast to sleep, and forget 

 everything till balmy March calls them. Their 

 workers are all dead, and in the spring they must be 

 their own workers till they can rear the first citizens 

 of their new colony. But higher, because more 

 efficient than they, the queen-bee rests in her hive 

 surrounded by a band of the same bees that did 

 " stake boot upon the summer's velvet buds," or, at 

 any rate, on the blossoms of early autumn. With 

 storehouses and winter store, food and the apparatus 

 for distilling the first nectar of spring, with her 

 retainers and artificers, she sits, not asleep, not 

 without carousing in her hall, facing the winter 

 instead of ignoring it, watching for the dawn instead 

 of passively awaiting a resurrection. 

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