It is a still summer day. In a sunny meadow a bee is pushing her head into the cup of a flower as far as she can reach. She is sucking up nectar to make into honey. Nectar is like sweetened water, and when a flower blooms on a plant or tree there is nearly always a drop of nectar in it.

A honeybee has a long tongue, something like that of a mosquito. With this tongue she sucks nectar from the cups of flowers all day long.

A honeybee has two stomachs. One is for the food she eats; while the other is a special honey stomach, or sac, for storing nectar. When she has gathered nectar from a clover or an apple blossom, she stores it away in her honey sac, and carries it back to the hive. This honey sac is so tiny that a honeybee can carry only one drop of nectar in it at a time. It takes hundreds of these tiny drops of nectar, and many trips of hundreds of bees to make a single spoonful of honey. In the hive the bees put the sweet watery nectar into little wax cells and fan it with their wings to blow off the extra moisture. In this way it becomes the thick, sticky honey so good to eat on bread and toast.

The bees who work getting nectar from flowers are called "honey gatherers. " They are always full-grown "lady" bees. All lady bees, both young and old, are called workers, because they work very hard from morning to night at their different tasks.

The honey gatherers start out in the morning, as soon as the sun has dried the dew on the plants. All day long they keep going back and forth from the flowers to their hive.

Some flowers have more nectar than others. For instance, clover blossoms have so much more than roses that bees get more nectar from a small field of clover than from a garden full of roses. How lucky this is for the bees! There are so many more clover blossoms than roses.

In some flowers, like the honey suckle, the nectar is in such a deep tube that the honeybee's tongue is too short to reach it. Neither can her smooth jaws bite a hole in the flower.

So the wise honeybee waits until a big noisy bumblebee comes along, cuts a hole through the tube of the flower with her sharp jaws, and takes out some of the nectar. Then, after the bumblebee has flown away, the honeybee goes to the same deep-tubed flower and helps herself. But she was not the one who damaged the flower. Honeybees do not harm flowers.

Honeybees do not travel from one kind of flower to another on the same trip. If they begin with clover blossoms, they keep on visiting clover as long as these flowers have nectar in them.

Some flowers do not have nectar all day long. Toward noon the nectar in buckwheat blossoms dries up, so honey bees can get no more until the next morning. This makes them very cross, as other kinds of flowers are not always in bloom, and honeybees are unhappy when they are not hard at work.

Honeybees usually fly from half a mile to two miles to gather nectar. They have even been known to go as far as six miles from their hive when they were unable to find much nectar nearer home.