All these are the foragers, or honey gatherers, and it is their business to visit hundreds of flowers over the country side, and to extract from them, by the aid of their wonderful tongues, the tiny drops of nectar. When their honey-sac is full, they return to the hive with all speed, and rushing inside, hand over the fruits of their labours to the house bees. You will be surprised to hear that a bee has to visit over 100 flowers before her honey-sac is filled, and we must not forget that this tiny sac when full holds only one-third of a drop. Now you will understand what a great number of bees are required, and how hard they have to work, in order to make 1 lb. of honey. Yet some hives give more than 200 lbs. of honey in a season! Just think of the vast amount of labour and the incessant toil required for this result. But the bees are always busy, and the proverb, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard,” might be quite well changed to “bee,” for I question whether the ant really works harder than the bee. From the time that the first ray of the morning sun strikes the dewy fields, until the sunset merges into misty twilight, all is bustle and hurry in the bee-city. So hard do the foragers work that instead of living three or four years like the queen, they often live only two or three weeks in the summer. In this short time their wings become quite worn away, and their poor little bodies are covered with wounds. If we look carefully at the door of a hive on a warm summer’s day, we shall no doubt see some of these poor worn-out creatures. They can no longer take part in the great work of the hive, and so for a short time they come out into the sunshine and dodder about the alighting-board. Their mission in life being over, no doubt they will summon up all their remaining strength to fly away to some quiet spot where they will die, unheeded and unknown. Their last thought is to die somewhere away from the hive, so that their bodies may not interfere with the work of the city, and will not need others to carry them to a burial-place. How sad it is to think of these noble little workers, thousands upon thousands of which out of each hive willingly give up their lives for the great work of their race. Besides the ever-busy foragers, there are other bees coming and going who do not appear to be in such a hurry. Each has two bright-coloured spots on her hind legs. These bees are the pollen gatherers, who collect the “bee-flour”; we might rightly call them the millers of the hive, and a picture of them is shown in Plate XIX.