THE modern commercial bee-keeper—the man who keeps his bees in hives of the most approved construction, all alike in colour and shape, and all in straight rows—is too prone to look only on the practical side of his work, and to regard with a certain ill-concealed contempt anything that does not directly promote what is, in his view, the one and only object of apiculture, that of honey-getting. But with the bee-keeper who is also a bee-lover, the tendency is all the other way. To live in the very spirit of wonder, as he must who has once dipped down below the surface of hive-life, is to saddle but a slow, ambling jade for the race in material prosperity. In a bee-garden the habit of rumination comes on one like creeping paralysis, gradually but irresistibly. It is one thing, on a fine June morning, to start away from the house, pipe in mouth and busily trundling the honey-barrow, intent on a long day’s work among the hives; it is quite another thing to keep industriously to the task hour after hour, when the sun has fixed his slothful golden grip upon you, and the drowsy song of the bees has worked its will on heart and mind. Good resolutions have a way of petering out, reasonably enough, under these inviting circumstances. The honey-barrow makes the most comfortable seat in the world, and can be pulled up just where the shade of the linden-trees is thickest. Moreover, the blue smoke of tobacco, drifting lazily up through the sunshine, adds just that touch of deliberation needed in a scene where all is unmitigated, almost desperate toil; while what difference can it make if one alone be idle in the hundred thousand? And so, as often as not, the creaking wheel comes permanently to rest under the lindens; the honey is left to the honey-makers; the thoughts follow the bees into their hives, or may-be wend away over seas to the great plantations, where the dry weed filling the pipe-bowl was once a green leaf in an ocean of green, flecked over with blossom, and sung over by bees, whose ancestors might have come from this very nook in old England, where it is now all ending in smoke and quiet thought. But, especially on rainy days, when there is much to do indoors—preparing the section-racks, discharging the honey from the full combs that, empty, they may be returned to the hives for refilling on the morrow, and what not—the tendency to set aside obvious, humdrum duties in beemanship has a still more capable ally. The beeman with a microscope has given the seven-leagued boots to his conscience; he will never catch up with it again in a whole life’s march. If the daily work in the hive, as seen with the naked eye, is a fascinating, duty-dispersing study, a microscopic acquaintance with the hive-worker herself, and the details of her extraordinary equipment, lets one into a whole new world of fact and thought.