"My dear young friend,--I dare say you have heard it said that things are great or small by comparison; this true saying is highly applicable on the present occasion. To you the accompanying pot of honey may seem to be a small pittance: to the industrious little insects by whom it was harvested it would have seemed to be a large treasure. By you, I dare say, it could be very comfortably disposed of at _half-a-dozen meals:_ it would serve to maintain a hundred bees for _twice as many months!_ Think how many flowers a bee must have visited to collect it, the trouble she must have had in constructing combs to receive it, how many journeys she must have made to import it, the pains she must afterwards have taken to secure it from being injured by exposure to the air, as well as from the depredations of wasps, moths, and other plunderers. I do not call your attention to these things for the purpose of enhancing or magnifying my little present in your eyes, but because they form a few among the many wonders of creation, with which we are so familiar that we are apt to pass them by without being duly impressed by them. How few are there, for instance, who, when partaking of their daily food, ever think of the numerous heads and hands that have been occupied in producing it, their anxious thoughts and laborious toils--to use a homely expression, that consider how the bread comes into the far mouths! But I have said enough, I trust, to set you a thinking, to call into exercise that best gift of God to man, his reasoning faculty, and feel confident that you will not be addressed in vain by your very sincere friend." (Applause.) I have told you that the working bees form the most numerous portion of the community; indeed for eight months of the year they and the queen constitute the whole; and in the height of the season every family numbers from twelve to twenty thousand, or more, but in winter they become very much diminished, owing to the natural shortness of their lives, which only extend to from six to eight months. The bees that are so rapidly bred in spring, as to render swarming or additional room necessary, finish their career about the commencement of winter: on those alone that are bred in smaller numbers, in autumn, devolves the business of the hive till the following spring, in the course of which they also become defunct. Hence the very great disproportion observable in the number of all such families at different seasons of the year.