The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 94, August, 1865

Excerpt

AMONG THE HONEY-MAKERS.

The luxury of all summer's sweet sensation is to be found when one lies at length in the warm, fragrant grass, soaked with sunshine, aware of regions of blossoming clover and of a high heaven filled with the hum of innumerous bees.

It is that happy hum—which seems to the closed eyes as if the silent sunbeams themselves had found a voice and were brimming the bending blue with music as they went about their busy chemistry—that gives the chief charm to the moment; for it tunes the mind to its own key, the murmuring expression of all pleasant things, the chord of sunshine and perfume and flowers.

And it is, indeed, the sound of a process scarcely less subtile than the sunbeams' own, of that alchemy by which the limpid drop of sweet insipidity at the root of any petal is transformed to the pungent flavor and viscid drip of honey. A beautiful woman, weary of her frivolities, once half in jest envied the fate of Io, dwelling all day in the sun, all night in the starshine and dew, and fed on pasturage of violets; but there is the morning beam, the evening ray, the breeze, the dew, the spirit of the violet and of the cowslip, all gathered like a distillation and sealed into the combs, and this is the tune to which it is harvested. Beyond doubt there is no such eminent sound of gladness in all the world. The cricket seems to speak of more spiritual things than those of this sphere. As to bird-song, poets differ.

"O nightingale, what doth she ail,
And is she sad or jolly?
Sure ne'er on earth was sound of mirth
So like to melancholy,"

exclaims one in compromise with all the others. Every echo is full of a lonesome sadness. The musical baying of a distant dog by night accentuates the depth and darkness and stillness; the crowing of cocks from farm to farm, in their cordon of sentinelship against the invasion of the dawn, tells the hearer how all too well the world is getting on without him; the lowing of kine through the clear noon air comes robbed of roughness, in its deep, mellow sonority, like the oboe and bassoon, full of a penetrating pathos. Let Nature but interpose a sheet of water or a bit of wood, and the merriest joy-bells that ever rang are infused with that melancholy which is the overplus of rapture. But there is no distance to lend that enchantment to the buzzing of a bee: it is close about us, a universal sibilation; the air is made of it; it sings of work, that joy and privilege,—of a home, of plenty, of a world whose color and odor make one giddy with good cheer; it may have many varying elements, but its constant is content.

"When the south wind, in May days,
With a net of shining haze,
Silvers the horizon wall,
And, with softness touching all,
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,
And, infusing subtile heats,
Turns the sod to violets,
Thou, in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow breezy bass."

And although this burly rover is not our little bee of the hive, but his saucy, sonsy country-cousin, the song of the one is scarcely sweeter than that of the other, while they blend into rarest unison. And well may both be sweet, it is such a pleasant thing to live; there is the hive to furnish, there is the dear nest underground; they forget yesterday's rain, to-morrow's frost is but a dim phantasm,—the sun is so warm to-day on their little brown backs, and here is such store of honey. It is true, the humble-bee is much the most dazzling,—he has the prestige of size, moreover; but the other may find some favor in his new bronze and gold armor and his coarse velvet mantle,—there are few creatures that can afford to labor in half such array as that, but when the work is so nice one's dress must correspond: it would never do to rumple round among the rose-leaves, black as a beetle, and expect not only to be heaped with delicates, but to be intrusted with love-tokens. One cannot be so splendid as the moths and sphinxes, who have nothing to do all summer but to lay eggs among the petals that their offspring may devour them; no, there is work to be done. But though one toils, one has a dignity to maintain; one remembers it readily when he has been made the insignia of royalty, when kings have worn his effigy, when popes have put him in their coats-of-arms; one cannot forget that he has himself been called the Winged Pontiff of the Flowers. See him now, as he hovers over the clover, not the red kind,—for him each floret of that is deep as those shafts of the hashish-eater's dream, where the broken tubes of the honeysuckle being planted in the sand, their mouths level with the floor of the desert, they became wells, and the Arab women dropped their buckets therein and drew them up dripping with honey,—it is the small white clover on which he alights, whose sweets are within reach of his little proboscis; or, lost in that great blue-bell, he swings it with his motion and his melody; or he burrows deep in the heart of a rose, never rolling there, as it has erroneously been said, but, collecting the pollen with his pincers, swims over the flower while brushing it into the baskets of his hinder legs, and then lights again for a fresh fare, till, laden and regaled, he loudly issues forth, dusty with treasure; and les rois fainéans, the Merovingian kings, who powdered their heads and their beards with gold, were no finer fellows than he....