The Life of the Bee 
is resumed after the execution of the drones, 
although with diminishing zeal, for flowers 
are becoming scarce. The great festivals, 
the great dramas, are over. The autumn 
honey, however, that shall complete the 
indispensable provisions, is accumulating 
within the hospitable walls; and the last 
reservoirs are sealed with the seal of white, 
incorruptible wax. Building ceases, births 
diminish, deaths multiply ; the nights 
lengthen, and days grow shorter. Rain and 
inclement winds, the mists of the morning, 
the ambushes laid by a hastening twilight, 
carry off hundreds of workers who never 
return; and soon, over the whole little 
people, that are as eager for sunshine as the 
grasshoppers of Attica, there hangs the cold 
menace of winter. 
Man has already taken his share of the 
harvest. Every good hive has presented 
him with eighty or a hundred pounds of 
honey; the most remarkable will some- 
times even give two hundred, which repre- 
sent an enormous expanse of liquefied light, 
immense fields of flowers that have been 
290 
