I would like to thank list members for all the help. I finally have found the
poem, 'Telling the Bees'.  It was not written by Emily Dickinson, as was
indicated by Adams in, "Beekeeping: The Gentle Craft". (Or at the very least,
I have not yet found any such work, by Dickinson, but I have yet to ask any
Dickinson scholars.  She does have many bee references in her works.)   The
work with the title, 'Telling the Bees' was written by:John Greenleaf
Whittier.
 
As thanks, I will now include the text of telling the bees.
 
Many thanks to Doug Angerman, who sent me the work, and to the many others
who offered to send it to me. It is from from the collection of bee poetry A
Murmur of Bees by Amoret Scott - Oxford Illustrated Press LTD. It looks like
a wonderful collection!
 
 
Bruce Hamilton   (Cerebral Beekeeper)
Vancouver, BC.
Canada
 
-------------------------------------------------
 
Telling the Bees
 
Here is the place; right over the hill
    Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
    And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.
 
There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
    And the poplars tall;
And the barn's brown length, and the cattle yard,
   And the white horns tossing above the wall.
 
There are the beehives ranged in the sun;
   And down by the Brink
Of the brook are her poor flowers, weed-o'errun,
   Pansy and daffodil, rose and pink.
 
A year has gone, as the tortoise goes,
   Heavy and slow;
And the same rose blows, and the same sun glows,
   And the same brook sings of a year ago.
 
There's the same sweet clover-smell in the breeze;
   And the June sun warm
Tangles his wings of fire in the trees,
   Setting as then, over Fernside farm.
 
I mind me how with a lover's care
   From my Sunday Coat
I brushed of the burrs, and smoothed my hair,
   And cooled at the brookside my brow and throat.
 
Since we parted, a month had passed,-
   To love, a year;
Down through the beeches I looked at last
   On the little red gate and the well-seep near.
 
I can see it all now,- the slantwise rain
   Of light through the leaves,
The sundown's blaze on her window-pane,
   The bloom of her roses under the eves.
 
Just the same as a month before,-
   The house and the trees,
The barn's brown gable, the vine by the door,-
   Nothing changed but the hives of bees.
 
Before them, under the garden wall,
   Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
   Draping each hive with a shred of black.
 
Trembling, I listened: the summer sun
   Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
   Gone on the journey we all must go!
 
Then I said to myself, 'My Mary weeps
   For the dead to-day:
Haply her blind old grandsire sleeps
   The fret and pain of his age away.'
 
But her dog whined low; on the doorway sill,
   With his cane to his chin,
The old man sat; and the chore-girl still
   Sang to the bees stealing out and in.
 
And the song she was singing ever since
   In my ear sounds on:-
'Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
   Mistress Mary is dead and gone!
 
        John Greenleaf Whittier
        1807-1892