In the wealthy and populous cities work is resumed after the execution of the drones,—­although with diminishing zeal, for flowers are becoming scarce.  The great festivals, the great dramas, are over.  The autumn honey, however, that shall complete the indispensable provisions, is accumulating within the hospitable walls; and the last reservoirs are sealed with the seal of white, incorruptible wax.  Building ceases, births diminish, deaths multiply; the nights lengthen, and days grow shorter.  Rain and inclement winds, the mists of the morning, the ambushes laid by a hastening twilight, carry off hundreds of workers who never return; and soon, over the whole little people, that are as eager for sunshine as the grasshoppers of Attica, there hangs the cold menace of winter.

Man has already taken his share of the harvest.  Every good hive has presented him with eighty or a hundred pounds of honey; the most remarkable will sometimes even give two hundred, which represent an enormous expanse of liquefied light, immense fields of flowers that have been visited daily one or two thousand times.  He throws a last glance over the colonies, which are becoming torpid.  From the richest he takes their superfluous wealth to distribute it among those whom misfortune, unmerited always in this laborious world, may have rendered necessitous.  He covers the dwellings, half closes the doors, removes the useless frames, and leaves the bees to their long winter sleep.  They gather in the centre of the hive, contract themselves, and cling to the combs that contain the faithful urns; whence there shall issue, during days of frost, the transmuted substance of summer.  The queen is in the midst of them, surrounded by her guard.  The first row of the workers attach themselves to the sealed cells; a second row cover the first, a third the second, and so in succession to the last row of all, which form the envelope.  When the bees of this envelope feel the cold stealing over them, they re-enter the mass, and others take their place.  The suspended cluster is like a sombre sphere that the walls of the comb divide; it rises imperceptibly and falls, it advances or retires, in proportion as the cells grow empty to which it clings.  For, contrary to what is generally believed, the winter life of the bee is not arrested, although it be slackened.  By the concerted beating of their wings—­little sisters that have survived the flames of the sun—­which go quickly or slowly in accordance as the temperature without may vary, they maintain in their sphere an unvarying warmth, equal to that of a day in spring.  This secret spring comes from the beautiful honey, itself but a ray of heat transformed, that returns now to its first condition.  It circulates in the hive like generous blood.  The bees at the full cells present it to their neighbours, who pass it on in their turn.  Thus it goes from hand to hand and from mouth to mouth, till it attain the extremity of the group in whose thousands of hearts one destiny,