It is only under a strong glass that the true place of the honey-bee in the scale of creation can be entirely estimated. Her work is evident to the most casual eye, but of the worker herself we get only a vague idea of a dim-hued, crystal-winged atom running a perpetual race with the wind and sunshine, or forming an all but undistinguishable speck in the seething, heaving multitudes within the hive. But here, on the stage of the microscope, the honey-bee is revealed as a totally new creature; and, by little and little, a story unfolds itself about her which, in its way, is a perfect epic of life. No one can study the perplexities of hive-life for long without a conviction that a creature executing such varied and elaborate works must, of necessity, be herself highly developed in body and mind. But it seldom happens, even with the veriest tiro, that the expectation comes anywhere near the reality in such an examination of the common worker-bee. The unaided eye sees a creature, fashioned simply enough to all appearances—a brown, attenuated body, two pairs of wings, the usual six legs common to all insects, and a couple of bent horns, like threshels, that continuously waver to and fro. But under the glass this simplicity at once vanishes. From the tip of her antennæ to the barbed end of her sting, there is nothing about the honey-bee that is not made on the most bewilderingly, complicated plan. Watching a hive at work on a busy day in summer, the attention is first drawn to the pollen-gatherers, labouring in by the thousand with the big, oval, brightly-coloured masses fixed to their hindmost legs; and it is first to the pollen-carrying organism that the glass is now naturally directed. The six legs, which looked all very much alike to the naked eye, are seen to be in three pairs, and the construction of each pair differs very markedly from that of its fellows. So far from their being simple legs, each has no fewer than nine jointed parts, and nearly every part carries a special piece of mechanism necessary and vital in the daily work of the bee. Whole treatises might be written on the functions of the human hand, yet the hand is a very simple contrivance compared with the legs of the honey-bee. The pollen-carrying device is on the thigh of the hind leg. The thigh is broadened out and hollowed, and round this oblong cavity is a fringe of incurving bristles which look as if they would hold anything. But before the pollen can be packed in these baskets it must be collected and kneaded together. Practically the whole body of the bee is used in pollen-gathering. Under the low power of the microscope it is seen that hardly any part of the trunk or limb is without its dense covering of hairs; but with the high objective these hairs cease to be hairs, and are changed into actual feathers, delicate herring-bone implements, which sweep up the pollen as the bee dives into the flower-cup for the nectar that lies below.