At the end of winter and before spring, rural Bengal is dressed in wonderful colours. Yellow is everywhere across the villages, beckoning from the mustard fields. Bees and insects dart from place to place, very busy with their work, roaming all around to collect honey.

The sight of honeybees coming and going and collecting honey in the yellow mustard fields is truly lovely. It brings to mind the poem by the poet Nabakrishna Bhattacharya: "Honeybee, honeybee, where do you go dancing? Won't you stop once, brother? Those flowers bloom in the woods; I go to gather honey; I have no time to stop..."

The bees grow busier from the month of Agrahayan in late autumn, and busier still before spring. The time for collecting honey from mustard flowers is coming to an end, so they step up their work. Such scenes can be seen across rural Bangladesh, and visitors capture photographs of the bees at work on their mobile phones.

The endless mustard fields all around are the boundless beauty of rural Bengal at the end of winter. Among the airy yellow mustard flowers are green leaves and pods. From these pods comes mustard oil, which is of great use in our daily lives, and it brings a smile of satisfaction to farmers' faces.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.