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LONDON: PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET.

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THE HONEY-BEE.

How the little busy bee improves each shining hour -makes hay when the sun shines-makes honey, that is, when flowers blow-is not only a matter for the poet and the moralist, and the lover of nature, but has become an important subject of rural, and cottage, and even political economy itself. If West Indian crops fail, or Brazilian slave-drivers turn sulky, we are convinced that the poor at least may profit as much from their bee-hives as ever they will from the extracted juices of parsneps or beet-root. And in this manufacture they will at least begin the world on a fair footing. No monopoly of capitalists can drive them from a market so open as this. Their winged stock have free pasture-commonage without stint-be the proprietor who he may, wherever the freckled cowslip springs and the wild thyme blows. Feudal manors and parked royalties, high deer-fences and forbidding boundary belts, have no exclusiveness for them; no action of trespass can lie against them, nor are they ever called upon for their certificates. But if exchange be no robbery, they are no thieves: they only take that which would be useless to all else besides, and even their hard-earned

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