The Bee and the Spider

On the leaves and flowers of the same shrub, a Spider and a Bee pursued their several occupations; the one covering her thighs with honey ; the other distending his bag with poison. The Spider, as he glanced his eye obliquely at the Bee, was ruminating with spleen on the superiority of her productions. And how happens it, said he, in a peevish tone, that I am able to collect nothing but poison from the selfsame plant that supplies thee with honey? My pains and industry are not less than thine; in those respects we are each indefatigable. It proceeds only, replied the Bee, from the different disposition of our nature, mine gives a pleasing flavour to every thing I touch, whereas thine converts to poison what, by a different process, had been the purest honey.

source: Robert Dodsley. 1809. Select Fables of Aesop and Other Fabulists, 

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