52 The Honey-Makers 



The antennae, in some mysterious way, afford means of 

 communication. By them the bee says all it feels to its 

 friends and relatives. 



Watch two bees meet on a window-frame : they instantly 

 cross feelers, and if they come from the same hive there 

 ensues such an outpouring of bee-talk, such a tremor of 

 crossed antennae, such an evident condition of excitement 

 all through their bodies as might well fill the most practised 

 gossip with envy. 



One can imagine the graphic terms in which they relate 

 the recent awful experience of their capture, how they were 

 suddenly and rudely jerked from a sweet blossom, and after 

 indescribable shaking about in a strange thing made of 

 bands too close together for them to get through and too 

 tough for them to bite through, finally found themselves, as 

 they supposed, free. 



The joy after the fear! but alas, their happiness was of 

 short duration ; for when they attempted to return to the 

 clover field visible in the distance, they found themselves 

 suddenly cliecked in mid-career by what seemed a wall of 

 thickened air, a strange, hard, cold, transparent nightmare 

 of a barrier which they could see through, but could not 

 pass. 



Poor little bees, no wonder their antennae fly in the 

 discussion of such queer facts, and how fortunate that 

 the ears of the ogre, their captor, are not attuned to the 

 remarks of their antennae, as they express their opinion 

 concerning him morally mentally, and physically ! 



Just what bees talk about is their secret — also just how 

 they talk. Suffice it to know that they do talk, or at least 

 have a method of communication which, it may be, more 

 resembles the sign language of the human deaf mutes than 

 the articulate speech of those able to hear. 



Perhaps it is a series of touches or taps like those of the 



