Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 October 1893 — The Bee’s Hard Day’s Work. [ARTICLE]

The Bee’s Hard Day’s Work.

Every head of clover consists of about sixty flower tubes, each of which contains an infinitesimal quantity of sugar. Bees will often visit a hundred different heads of clover before retiring to the hive, and in order to obtain the sugar necessary for a load must, therefore, thrust their tongues into about 6,000 different flowers. A bee will make twenty trips a day when the clover patch is convenient to the hive, and thus will draw the sugar from 120,000 different flowers in the course of a single day’s work. Men think they have hard work to make a living, but their employment, however arduous, is an easy and pleasant task compared to that of a working bee.— [St. Louis Globe-Democrat.