CONCERNING HONEY 109 
ently, is to be ignorant indeed. Of such are the 
old lady who dwelt in the Mile End Road, and 
believed that cocoanuts were monkeys’ eggs, and 
the man who will tell you without expectancy of 
contradiction that honey is the food of bees. 
Now this is no essay in cheap paradox, but a 
sober attempt to reinstate in the public mind the 
unsophisticated truth. The natural foods of the 
bee-hive are the nectar and the pollen, the ‘‘ love 
ferment ”’ of the flowers. On these the bee subsists 
entirely, so long as she can obtain them, and will 
go to her honey stores only when nature’s fresh 
supplies have failed. One speaks by poetic licence, 
or looseness, of bees gathering honey from blos- 
soming plants. The fact is they do nothing of the 
kind, and never did. The sweet juices of clover, 
heather, and the like, differ fundamentally, both in 
appearance and in chemical properties from honey. 
Though the main ingredient in honey is nectar, the 
two are totally different things; and honey, far from 
being the normal food of bees, is only a standby 
for hard times, a sort of emergency ration, put up 
in as little compass and with as great a concen- 
tration as such things can be. 
The story of how honey is made, and why it is 
made at all, forms one of the most interesting items 
in the history of the hive-bee. In a land where 
nectar-yielding plants flourish all the year through, 
if such a spot exist at all, there would be no honey, 
because the necessity for it would not occur. 
Hive-bees in such a land would go all their lives, 
and assuredly never dream of honey-making. But 
wherever there is winter, or a season when the 
supply of nectar and pollen temporarily fails, the 
