Thoreau writes in his journal:
Talking with Rice this afternoon about the bees which I discovered the other day, [9 February] he told me something about his bee-hunting. He and Pratt go out together once or twice a year. He takes a little tin box with a little refined sugar and water about the consistency of honey, or some honey in the comb, which comes up so high only in the box as to let the lid clear a bee’s back, also some little bottles of paint—red, blue, white, etc.—and a compass properly prepared to line the bees with, the sights perhaps a foot apart
9 A.M.—to Conantum.
The rain has diminished the snow and hardened the crust, and made bare ground in many places. A yellow water, a foot or two deep, covers the ice on the meadows, but is not frozen quite hard enough to bear. As the river swells, the ice cracks along both sides over.
