these be the wonderful drops of light he had seen but a moment ago,
unceasingly flashing and sparkling, as they darted among the pearls
and the gold of a thousand wide-open calyces?

By observation-hive is meant a hive of glass, furnished with black
curtains or shutters. The best kind have only one comb, thus
permitting both faces to be studied. These hives can be placed in a
drawing-room, library, etc., without inconvenience or danger. The
bees that inhabit the one I have in my study in Paris are able even
in the stony desert of that great city, to find the wherewithal to
nourish themselves and to prosper.

They appear to be shivering in the darkness, to be numbed,
suffocated, so closely are they huddled together; one might fancy
they were ailing captives, or queens dethroned, who have had their
one moment of glory in the midst of their radiant garden, and are
now compelled to return to the shameful squalor of their poor
overcrowded home.

It is with them as with all that is deeply real; they must be
studied, and one must learn how to study them. The inhabitant of
another planet who should see men and women coming and going almost
imperceptibly through our streets, crowding at certain times around
certain buildings, or waiting for one knows not what, without
apparent movement, in the depths of their dwellings, might conclude
therefrom that they, too, were miserable and inert. It takes time to
distinguish the manifold activity contained in this inertia.

And indeed every one of the little almost motionless groups in the
hive is incessantly working, each at a different trade. Repose is