Father never spent an hour in that well. He trusted me to sink
it straight and plumb, and I did, and built a fine covered top over it,
and swung two iron-bound buckets in it from which we all drank for many
a day.
The honey-bee arrived in America long before we boys did, but several
years passed ere we noticed any on our farm. The introduction of the
honey-bee into flowery America formed a grand epoch in bee history.
This sweet humming creature, companion and friend of the flowers, is
now distributed over the greater part of the continent, filling
countless hollows in rocks and trees with honey as well as the
millions of hives prepared for them by honey-farmers, who keep and
tend their flocks of sweet winged cattle, as shepherds keep sheep,--a
charming employment, "like directing sunbeams," as Thoreau says. The
Indians call the honey-bee the white man's fly; and though they had
long been acquainted with several species of bumblebees that yielded
more or less honey, how gladly surprised they must have been when
they discovered that, in the hollow trees where before they had found
only coons or squirrels, they found swarms of brown flies with fifty
or even a hundred pounds of honey sealed up in beautiful cells.
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