We might learn many a lesson from the industry of the bees, when we poor mortals get tired or lazy. To make one pound of clover honey, bees must deprive sixty thousand clover blossoms of their nectar, and to do this they have to make three million seven hundred and fifty thousand visits to the blossoms. That is, if one bee alone collected the pound of honey it would have to make that many journeys back and forth from the hive to the flowers. When we consider that the distance traveled is often from one to three miles in a journey, how can we compute the miles this little toilsome creature has to make to collect the pound of honey that we consider of so little worth? Surely there is many an open bible in nature, from which we could gather many a lesson if we were not so bigoted, proud and stupid. I am reminded of a remark of Charles Kingsley’s, “Ere I grow too old, I trust to be able to throw away all pursuits save natural history, and die with my mind full of God’s facts instead of men’s lies.” Another item of interest. There is no king or emperor among the bees, as Shakespere states in his play of King Henry the Fifth, nor a queen. Theirs is a democratic government without even a leader, the worker bees each attending to their own business, all acting together on some general principle for the common welfare. The queen, so-called by men, is only such in name, as she does nothing but her duty, as the only mother, to provide for the increase and continuance of the family. There is no ruler with a royal squad of idle relatives to live in dissipation and luxury on the industry of the laborers, no blathering parliament, no judges, no high or low courts, no big salaries, no legal members to fleece the innocent, no policemen, for there are no evil-doers, no annual budgets to provide for from the increased taxation of the poor, no expense of any kind whatever, as there are no idlers except a few drones kept in case of a paternal necessity, the most being killed,—no criminals, no poor, no rich, no castes! What a lesson a nation of bees can teach the most exalted human nation on earth! And yet humanity in this nineteenth century boasts itself as being civilized, enlightened and Christian, and having been created in the image of God! The old station life again. The blessed books, the gardens and the duties of each day occupied my attention.