Word: flower
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...school. Thousands watched as 31 black or white hearses (black for men and older boys, white for the plane's stewardess and the younger boys) moved slowly out of the school grounds toward the cemeteries. In the bright sunlight at the Southern General cemetery, not far from the flower-heaped grave of Venezuela's murdered President Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, twelve coffins were lowered into one large grave, others into family plots. Then, as the parents turned away to their cheerless Christmas, Padre Vélaz flew back to the classrooms of the Colegio...
...each hive commune, says Dr. von Frisch, a few bees are honey scouts. They patrol the neighborhood looking for new-opened flowers. Their big, compound eyes see well, but they do not see what human eyes see. Blind to red, a bee sees a clear red flower as grey. But at the other end of its color spectrum, a bee can see ultraviolet, to which human eyes are blind...
...scout bee cannot smell flowers at any great distance; its odor perception is about as sharp as a man's. But when it alights on a flower to which it has been attracted by sight, it is so close to the flower's scent glands that very faint odors are perceptible. Most flowers have "scent spots," which the bee feels out with the organs of smell on its antennae. The scent spots lead the scout to the cups where the nectar lies...
...nectar. A sugar content of 5% does not interest a bee; such nectar would spoil in the hive before it could be concentrated into long-keeping honey. A 20% sugar content is satisfactory, and 40% makes the bee wildly enthusiastic. It sucks up some nectar and marks the flower with its own scent from a gland on its abdomen. Having thus staked a claim, it heads back to the hive to spread the glad news...
...evoke an English cathedral, a Corinthian temple or a bathhouse, but the interior is always the same: that of a third-rate movie palace . . . Varnished benches present a comfortable resting place for faithful buttocks. A drawing-room organ emits sugared water. A pulpit . . . two or three pots of flowers, that is all the decoration. Some temples retain an altar, but this outmoded object serves only to support a still larger number of flower pots...