Edgefield Advertiser

Did one ever sufficiently admire the entire elegance of the habits and pursuits of bees? their extraction of nothing but the quintessence of the flowers; their preference of those that have the finest and least adulterated odor; their avoidance of every thing squalid (so unlike flies); their eager ejection or exclusion of it from the hive, as in instances of carcasses of intruders, which, if they cannot drag away; they cover up and entomb; their love of clean, quiet and delicate neighbourhood, thymy places with brooks; their singularly clean management of so liquid and adhesive a thing as honey, from which they issue forth to their work as if they had nothing to do with it; their combination with honey-making of the elegant manufacture of wax, of which they make their apartments, and which is used by mankind for more than patrician or other choice purposes; their orderly policy, their delight in sunshine: their attention to one another; their apparent indifference to everything, purely regarding themselves apart from the common good? Beautiful are those tapers, without doubt; and well might the poet express his admiration at their being the result of the work of the little unconscious insect who compounded the material. So in every wealthy house in England, every evening, when lamps do not take its place, the same beautiful substance is lit up for the inmates to sit by, at their occupations of reading, or music, or discourse. "The bee is there with her odorous ministry. In the morning she has probably been at the breakfast table. In the morning, she is honey; in the evening, the waxen taper; in the summer noon, a voice in the garden or the window; in the winter, at all other times, a meteor of us in books." Leigh Hunt's Jar of Honey.