Where they went it is hard to say, but one hornet or a thousand crawling into a crevice to escape the cold is easily lost in the great world of out-of-doors. No worker survives the winter. I think the intensity of their labors during the summer, the continued use of that energy that bubbles within them all summer long, exhausts them and they succumb easily, worked out. With the young queens it is different. Their work is yet to come, and the strong young life within them gives them vitality to endure the winter, though seemingly frozen stiff in their crevices. Yet only a few of these come through in safety. If the queens of one hive all built next year, the pasture would be a far too busy place for mere man to visit.
It is just as well as it is, yet I am glad that each year sees at least one queen white-face pulp-making in the May sun. Pasture life without her uproarious progeny would lack spice. The great gray nest is pathetic in its emptiness, and I am glad to forget it and its bustling throng, remembering only the one busy worker that used to come into the tent and, having caught his fly, hang head downward from ridge-pole or canvas-edge by one hind foot while all his other feet were busy holding his lamb for the shearing.
THIN ICE
TOWARD midnight the pond fell asleep. All day long it had frolicked with the boisterous north wind, pretending to frown and turn black in the face when the cold shoulders of the gale bore down upon its surface, dimpling as the pressure left it and sparkling in brilliant glee as the low hung sun laughed across its ruffles. The wind went down with the sun, as north winds often do, and left a clear mirror stretching from shore to shore, and reflecting the cold yellow of the winter twilight.
As this chill twilight iced into the frozen purple of dusk, tremulous stars quivered into being out of the violet blackness of space. The nebular hypothesis is born again in the heavens each still winter night. It must have slipped thence into the mind of Kant as he stood in the growing dusk of some German December watching the violet-gray frost vapors of the frozen sky condense into the liquid radiance of early starlight, then tremble again into the crystalline glints of unknown suns whirling in majestic array through the full night along the myriad miles of interstellar space.
Standing on the water’s edge on such a night you realize that you are the very centre of a vast scintillating universe, for the stars shine with equal glory beneath your feet and above your head. The earth is forgotten. It has become transparent, and where before sunset gray sand lay beneath a half-inch of water at your toe-tips, you now gaze downward through infinite space to the nadir, the unchartered, unfathomable distance checked off every thousand million miles or so by unnamed constellations that blur into a milky way beneath your feet. The pond is very deep on still winter nights.