Uneasy Money by P. G. Wodehouse

The village of Brookport, Long Island, is a summer place. It lives, like the mosquitoes that infest it, entirely on its summer visitors, that hardy race which, once a year for a period of three months, gives up the comfort and coolness of spacious New York apartments to stew in stuffy cottages along the shores of the Great South Bay. At the time of the death of Mr. Ira Nutcombe, the only all-the-year-round inhabitants were the butcher, the grocer, the drugstore man, the other customary fauna of villages, and Miss Elizabeth Boyd, who rented the ramshackle farm known locally as Flack's and eked out a precarious livelihood by keeping bees.

If you take down your Encyclopedia Britannica -- Volume III, Aus to Bis, you will find that bees are a "large and natural family of the zoological order Hymenoptera, characterized by the plumose form of many of their hairs, by the large size of the basal segment of the foot. and by the development of a tongue for sucking liquid food," the last of which peculiarities, it is interesting to note, they shared with Claude Nutcombe Boyd, Elizabeth's brother, who for quite a long time -- till his money ran out -- had made liquid food almost his sole means of sustenance. These things, however, are by the way. We are not such snobs as to think better or worse of a bee because it can claim kinship with the Hymenoptera family, nor so ill-bred as to chaff it for having large feet. The really interesting passage in the article occurs later, where it says: "The bee industry prospers greatly in America. "