48 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
season, the bees had got at the early ivy-blossom, 
and so degraded all the batch. 
Watching bees at work of a fair morning in 
May, nothing excites the wonder of the casual 
looker-on more than the mysterious burdens they 
are for ever bringing home upon their thighs; 
semi-globular packs, always gaily coloured, and 
cften so heavy and cumbersome that the bee can 
hardly drag its weary way into the hive. This is 
pollen, to be stored in the cells, and afterwards 
kneaded up with honey as food for the young bees. 
The old man could say at once by the colour from 
which flower each load was obtained. The deep 
krown-gold panniers came from the gorse-bloom; 
the pure snow-white from the hawthorns; the vivid 
yellow, always so big and seemingly so weighty, 
had been filled in the buttercup meads. Now and 
again, in early spring, a bee would come blunder- 
ing home with a load of pallid sea-green hue. 
This came from the gooseberry bushes. And later, 
iri summer, when the poppies began to throw their 
scarlet shuttles in the corn, many of these airy 
cargoes would be of a rich velvety black. But 
there was one kind which the old bee-man had 
never yet succeeded in tracing to its flowery origin. 
He saw it only rarely, perhaps not a dozen times 
i: the season—a wonderful deep rose-crimson, 
singling out its bearer, on her passage through the 
throng, as with twin danger-lamps, doubly bright 
in, the morning glow. 
Keeping watch over the comings and goings of 
his bees was always his favourite pastime, year in 
and year out; but it was in the later weeks of May 
that his interest in them culminated. He had 
