Word: bee
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...psychology. They appointed Charles school ratcatcher-and so conquered his peculiar heart that he wore the Stonyhurst school uniform ("blue-tailed coat with gold buttons and a check waistcoat") on all special occasions until his death at the age of 83. Unfortunately, ratcatching also served to nourish the largest bee that ever buzzed in Charles Waterton's bonnet, i.e., his conviction that the common brown rat had been introduced to England by Protestant King George I. Thenceforth, the exterminating of the "Hanoverian rat" furnished the Squire with a pursuit that at first threatened to become his entire vocation...
...scarab of Egypt (Atauchus sacer), for example, Fabre discovered, possesses the instinctive gift of making a perfect sphere of dung for its food and a perfect pear for its larva, even as the bee is born with the gift of making a hexagonal prism...
...most amazing stories of innate instinct that could never have come by any process of evolution concerns Fabre's experiments with the mason bee, experiments suggested to Fabre by Darwin and made after the latter's death. The mason bee (Chalicodoma pyrenaica) builds a house of cement about as big as a thimble, fills it with honey, lays its larva, covers it over and then dies. Fabre took such houses that were built an inch apart and interchanged them, coloring with different colors each house and its bee for identification purposes. He then took the bees...
Bring a Tub. When the tree is found, it is marked. Then, in October, when the bees have stored all the honey they are going to for the season, the tree is cut down, or, as bee hunters say, "taken up." Bring a tub, advises Edgell. "The humiliation of returning [with the tub nearly empty] is as nothing compared to the exasperation of filling a couple of buckets and finding that you have no way of transporting the rest ..." His best haul: 97 Ibs. of honey from one tree...
...honey bee (Apis mellifera and kindred species) is not native to the U.S., but many fugitives from domestic hives have taken to the woods...