For observe the method and circumstance of their manufacture. You dig a pit for ironstone, and heap a mass of refuse on fruitful land; you blacken your God-given sky, and consume your God-given fuel, to melt the iron; you bind your labourer to the Egyptian toil of its castings and forgings; then, to refine his mind you send him to study Raphael at Kensington; and with all this cost, filth, time, and misery, you at last produce—the devil’s tail for your sustenance, instead of an honest three-legged stool.
You do all this that men may live—think you? Alas—no; the real motive of it all is that the fashionable manufacturer may live in a palace, getting his fifty per cent. commission on the work which he has taken out of the hands of the old village carpenter, who would have cut two stumps of oak in two minutes out of the copse, which would have carried your bench and you triumphantly,—to the end of both your times.
However, I must get back to my bees’ heads and tails, to-day;—what a serpent’s are like in their true type of Earthly Injustice, it may be worth our while to see also, if we can understand the “sad-eyed justice” first.
Sad-eyed! Little did Shakespeare think, I fancy, how many eyes the sad-eyed Justice had! or how ill she saw with them. I continually notice the bees at [[100]]Brantwood flying rapturously up to the flowers on my wall paper, and knocking themselves against them, again and again, unconvinceable of their fallacy; and it is no compliment to the wall paper or its artist, neither—for the flowers are only conventional ones, copied from a radiant Bishop’s cloak of the fifteenth century.
It is curious too, that although before coming to the leaf-cutting bee, Bingley expatiates on the Poppy bees’ luxurious tapestry, cut from the scarlet poppy, he never considers whether she could see it, or not, underground—(unless by help of the fiery glowworms’ eyes)—and still less, how long the cut leaves would remain scarlet. Then I am told wonderful things of the clasping of the curtains of her little tabernacle;—but when the curtains dry, and shrink, what then?
Let us hear what he tells us of the Rose bee, however—in full.
“These bees construct cylindrical nests of the leaves of the rose and other trees. These nests are sometimes of the depth of six inches, and generally consist of six or seven cells, each shaped like a thimble.[4] They are formed with the convex end of one fitting into the open end of another. The portions of the leaf of which they are made are not glued together,[5] nor are they any otherwise fastened, than in the nicety of their adjustment [[101]]to each other; and yet they do not admit the liquid honey to drain through them. The interior surface of each cell consists of three pieces of leaf, of equal size, narrow at one end, but gradually widening to the other, where the width equals half the length. One side of each of these pieces, is the serrated margin of the leaf. In forming the cell, the pieces of leaf are made to lap one over the other, (the serrated side always outermost,) till a tube is thus formed, coated with three or four, or more layers. In coating these tubes, the provident little animal is careful to lay the middle of each piece of leaf over the margins of others, so as, by this means, both to cover and strengthen the junctions. At the closed or narrow end of the cell, the leaves are bent down so as to form a convex termination. When a cell is formed, the next care of the Bee is to fill it with honey and pollen, which, being collected chiefly from the thistles, form a rose-coloured paste. With these the cell is filled to within about half a line of its orifice; and the female then deposits in it an egg, and closes it with three perfectly circular pieces of leaf, which coincide so exactly with the walls of the cylindrical cell, as to be retained in their situation without any gluten.[6] After this covering is fitted in, there still remains a hollow, which receives the convex end of the succeeding cell. In this manner the patient [[102]]and indefatigable animal proceeds, till her whole cylinder of six or seven cells is completed.
“This is generally formed under the surface of the ground,[7] in a tubular passage, which it entirely fills, except at the entrance. If the labour of these insects be interrupted, or the edifice be deranged, they exhibit astonishing perseverance in setting it again to rights.
“Their mode of cutting pieces out of the leaves for their work, deserves particular notice. When one of these Bees selects a rose-bush with this view, she flies round or hovers over it for some seconds, as if examining for the leaves best suited to her purpose. When she has chosen one, she alights upon it, sometimes on the upper, and sometimes on the under surface, or not unfrequently on its edge, so that the margin passes between her legs. Her first attack, which is generally made the moment she alights, is usually near the footstalk, with her head turned towards the point. As soon as she begins to cut, she is wholly intent on her labour; nor does she cease until her work is completed. The operation is performed by means of her jaws, with as much expedition as we could exert with a pair of scissors. As she proceeds, she holds the margin of the detached part between her legs, in such a manner that the section keeps giving way to her, and does not interrupt her progress. She makes her incision in a curved line, approaching the [[103]]midrib of the leaf at first; but when she has reached a certain point, she recedes from this towards the margin, still cutting in a curve. When she has nearly detached from the leaf the portion she has been employed upon, she balances her little wings for flight, lest its weight should carry her to the ground; and the very moment it parts, she flies off in triumph, carrying it in a bent position between her legs, and perpendicularly to her body.”
Now in this account, the first thing I catch at is the clue to the love of bees for thistles. “Their pollen makes a rose-coloured paste with their honey;” (I think some of my Scottish friends might really take measures to get some pure thistle honey made by their bees. I once worked all the working hours I had to spare for a fortnight, to clear a field of thistles by the side of the Tummel under Schehallien: perhaps Nature meant, all the while, its master and me to let it alone, and put a hive or two upon it.)