Deborah: " The Honey -Bee" 271 



' ' I know where the meadow-sweets exhale 

 And the white valerians load the gale, 

 I know the spot the bees love best." 



And on the bosom of the hills, 

 Wooing the bees, the modest heather 

 Waves to the wind its hardy bells." 



' ' From flower to flower the busy bee 



With anxious labour flies, 

 Alike from scents which give distaste 

 By fancy as disgusting placed, 



Repletes his useful thighs. 

 Nor does his vicious taste prefer 

 The fopling of some gay parterre, 



The mimicry of Art, 

 But where the meadow-violet dwells, 

 Nature replenishing his bells, 



Does ampler store impart." 



The centre figure of the home-life of bees is of course 

 the queen-bee, one of the chiefest wonders of the ani- 

 mated world. Volumes of facts have been published of 

 the almost incredible life-history of this insect, of its crea- 

 tion artificially by the drudges of the hive, of its terrible 

 life. A truly awful insect ; a made-up monster as it were 

 with a body complete in all its parts, but no soul, no heart. 

 Of the idolatrous devotion of the hive to this tyrant, literally 

 of their own construction, endless fanciful prose has been 

 written, but in verse it finds scarcely more than such passing 

 notice as when the Midsummer Fairies 



" Huddle in a heap and trembling stand 

 All round Titania, like the queen -bee's band." 



Then too the drones, the queen's paramours, "vex'd 

 and murmuring," says Keats, "like any drone shut out 

 from the fair bee-queen," whom the neuters pamper and 

 caress, until one day when, the population being equal to 

 the space, they fall upon the honey-fattened stingless throng 

 and sting them all to death ! 



