rest the cold has stiffened them. I go out in April and May and pick
them up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm
them in the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth of my hand,
until they can crawl into the hive. Heat is their life, and an
apparently lifeless bee may be revived by warming him. I have also
picked them up while rowing on the river and seen them safely to shore.
It is amusing to see them come hurrying home when there is a thunder-
storm approaching. They come piling in till the rain is upon them.
Those that are overtaken by the storm doubtless weather it as best they
can in the sheltering trees or grass. It is not probable that a bee
ever gets lost by wandering into strange and unknown parts. With their
myriad eyes they see everything; and then their sense of locality is
very acute, is, indeed, one of their ruling traits. When a bee marks
the place of his hive, or of a bit of good pasturage in the fields or
swamps, or of the bee-hunter's box of honey on the hills or in the
woods, he returns to it as unerringly as fate.

Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients than
it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the
modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of
youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in the
open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern
confectionery is poison beside it. Besides grape sugar, honey contains
manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions,
and dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.