Deborah: " The Honey -Bee." 267 



sycamore musical with bees ; " or the bean-field, heavy with 

 evening scent ; or the " honey'd lime all murmurous with 

 bees;" or the orchard trees, apple and pear and plum, 

 beset by marauding hosts of happy plunderers; or busy 

 about Keats' "globes of clover," so that the whole field 

 is humming, and the restless butterfly can hardly find a 

 blossom to sip at undisturbed ? 



' ' Crowds of bees are giddy with clover, 

 Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet." 



Jean Ingelow puts her bees in the white trefoil 



" Murmuring in the milk-white bloom 

 As babes will sigh for deep content." 



Others in "the trumpets of the eglantine," and, let 

 antiquaries say what they choose, Milton in the lines 



' ' Sweet briar or the vine 

 Or the twisted eglantine," 



meant the honeysuckle, the 



" Honeysuckle full of clear bee- wine " 



of Keats' delicious verse ; and so too mean the other 

 poets that make the same slip. Sometimes they call it 

 woodbine, "suckling the bee with honey and the moth" 

 (Hurdis), and sometimes eglantine, but they always mean 

 the same sweet plant, the honeysuckle, emblem of fidelity 

 in love, and beloved by bees. 



To clear the way before coming to the poets' Deborah 

 in her home-life, and as explanatory of their allusions, I 

 must return for a paragraph or two to the old subject of 

 the natural history of the real bee. The shorter my 

 reference the better. 



In Spring, then, the community consists of only one fertile 

 female bee, "the queen," and a staff of workers, "the 

 neuters," and as soon as ever the warmer weather enables 



