AT THE CITY GATES 57 
homeward with their pollen-baskets laden with 
funereal black. 
But, if you watch a hive at work on any bright 
spring or summer morning, you will see single bees 
occasionally pass with loads whose source has 
never yet been fathomed. The lean, glistening, 
rufous stuff that is continually borne through the 
hustling crowd is resin gathered from poplar or 
pine, and used to glue the straw hive down to its 
base-board, or to stop up draughty crevices and use- 
less corners, or, diluted into varnish, to paint the 
honeycombs with an acid-proof, preservative film. 
But now and then comes a bee with a load whose 
colour shines up like a danger-signal in darkness. 
Brilliant scarlet, or soft rose-crimson, or pale 
lavender, or gleaming white—who shall say in 
what far, forgotten nook of the country-side she 
has been adventuring, or what rare blossom she 
has chanced upon in the wilderness, and, despoil- 
ing it of its maiden treasure greedily, has quickened 
into duplication the beauty that was its reason 
for life? 
Yet the greatest wonder about all this pollen- 
gathering is that each separate load has been 
taken entirely from one species of flower. The 
little half-spheres are packed into the pollen-cells 
indiscriminately, orange on brown, pale yellow 
mingled with green, or buff, or grey. But each 
pair of panniers, representing a single journey, 
contains the pollen-dust of one kind of blossom 
