["And the bees, forming a circle around the two, will eagerly watch the strange duel"]
["The queen takes possession together with her servants, guardians and counsellors"]
THE LIFE OF THE BEE
I
ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE HIVE
I have not yet forgotten the first apiary I saw, where I learned to love the bees. It was many years ago, in a large village of Dutch Flanders, the sweet and pleasant country that rejoices in brilliant flowers; a country that gladly spreads out before us, as so many pretty toys, her illuminated gables and wagons and towers; her cupboards and clocks that gleam at the end of the passage; her little trees marshaled in line along quays and canal-banks, waiting, one almost might think, for some splendid procession to pass; her boats and her barges with sculptured sterns, her flower-like doors and windows, her spotless dams and many-coloured drawbridges; and her little varnished houses, bright as new pottery, from which bell-shaped dames come forth, all a-glitter with silver and gold, to milk the cows in the white-hedged fields, or spread the linen on flowery lawns that are cut into patterns of oval and lozenge and are most amazingly green.
To this spot an aged philosopher had retired, having become a little weary; and here he had built his refuge. His happiness lay all in the beauties of his garden; and best-loved, and visited most often, were the bee-hives. There were twelve of them, twelve domes of straw; and some he had painted a bright pink, and some a clear yellow, but most were a tender blue, for he had noticed the fondness of the bees for this color. These hives stood against the wall of the house, in the angle formed by one of those pleasant and graceful Dutch kitchens whose earthenware dresser, all bright with copper and brass, was reflected through the open door on to the peaceful water of the canal. And the water, carrying these familiar images beneath its curtain of poplars, led one's eyes to a calm horizon of meadows and of mills.