It is well-nigh two months now since the hives were packed down for the winter, and the bees are flying as thick as on many a summer’s day.  
Yet no one could mistake their flight for the summer flight.  It is not the straight-away eager rush up into the blue of the sunny morning—high away over hedgerow and village roof-top towards the clover-fields, whitening the far-off hillside with their tens of thousands of honey-brimming bells.  It is rather the , purposeless hanging-about of an busy people forced to make holiday.  Through it all there runs the pathetic interest in trifles, half-hearted and wholly artificial, that you see among the lolling crowd of men when a great strike is on—the thoughtful kicking at odd ; stride-measuring on the flag-stones; little vortices of excitement got up over minute incidents that would otherwise pass unnoticed; the earnest flagellation of memory over past happenings more trivial still.
 
Thus the bees idle about and wander, on this still November morning, doing just the things you would never expect a bee to do.  The greater number of them merely take long reaches a-wing through the sunshine, going off in one objectless direction, turning about at the end of a few yards with just as little apparent reason, coming back to the hive at length on no more obvious errand than that, where there is nothing to do, doing it in another place bears at least the of achievement.
 
But many of them succeed in up an almost ludicrous assumption of business.  One comes driving out of the hive-entrance at a great pace, designedly, as you would think, going out of her way to the few bees lounging there, as if the entrance-board were still with the streaming crowd of summer days foregone.  She stops an instant to rub her eyes clear of the hive-darkness; tries her wings a little to make sure of their powers for a heavy load; then, with a deep note like the twang of a guitar-string, launches out into the sun-steeped air.  But it is all a vain , and well she knows it.  Watch her as she flies, and you will see her busy ding-dong pace slacken a dozen yards away.  She fetches a turn or two above the leafless apple-branches of the garden, with the rest of the chanting, workless crew.  She may presently start off again at a livelier speed than ever, as though at being , even for a moment, from the duty that calls her away to the mist-clad hill.  But it always ends in the same fashion.  A little later she is fluttering down on the threshold of the silent hive, and running busily in, keeping up the fiction, you see, to the last.
 
An Officious
Many more set themselves to look for sweets where they must know there is little likelihood of finding any.  Scarce one goes near the glowing belt of pompons the garden on every side.  But here is one bee, an ancient dame, with wings and shiny thorax, outside a cranny in the old brick wall, and examining it with serious, .  She is obviously making-believe, to while away the time, that it is a choice blossom full of nectar.  She knows it is nothing of the kind; but that will neither check her ardour nor expedite the piece of play-acting.  She spins it out to the utmost, and leaves the one dusty at last only to go through the same performance at the next.
 
I often wonder wherein lies the to a hive-bee of an open window or door.  Sitting here ledgering in the little office of the bee-farm—where no honey, nor the smell of honey, is ever allowed to come—sooner or later, in the quiet of the golden morning, the familiar voice out.  It is startling at first, unless you are well used to it—this sudden high-pitched clamour breaking the silence about you; and the oldest bee-man must lay down pen or rule, and look up from his work to scan the intruder.
 
She has in at the door, and has stopped in mid-air a foot or two within the room.  The sound she makes is very different from that of a bee in ordinary flight.  You cannot mistake its meaning; it is one long-drawn-out, musical note of , an intense, wonder at all about her—the light, the walls covered with book-shelves, the littered table, and the vast wingless, drab-coloured creature sitting in the midst of it all, like a funnel-spider in his .  Bees entering a room in this way seldom stop more than a second or two, and, more rarely still, alight.  As a rule, they are gone the next moment as swiftly as they came, leaving the impression that their quick retreat was due to............