11.5 x 14 inches
$10/year
$1/copy
216 pp
The awesome lede of article headlined “The Bee Business”:
“There are in the U.S. some 250,000,000,000 honeybees, practically all of which are sedulously working themselves to death. Predominantly female, they spend their lives on an aromatic assembly line, supporting lazy males from which they get no pleasure and ravenous young from which they get no affection. Their quarters are as congested as a tenement, and their queen is solely interested in propagation. In their rare moments of elation they dance around the hive to inform their fellow workers that they have discovered a new source of food. Which leads them right back to work again. Their social setup has been variously interpreted as a monarchy, a democracy (English style), and a dictatorship of the proletariat. In reality it is a confusion of all of them. And the honeybees have been conditioned to that setup by the ages. Compared with them, the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World are brazenly individualistic. But it is this unrelenting devotion to a humdrum tradition of duty that makes the honeybee invaluable to man. For in gathering pollen for the larvae in the hive, the honeybee does more to spread fertility among plants and trees than anything else save the wind. And in gathering nectar for adults in the hive, the honeybee not only effects pollination but prepares a foodstuff man has been using since time began.”
Not a barbecue grill:
