ing of the bees out to pasture, and it deserves more attention than it has yet met with in this country. The transportation we have hitherto spoken of is only to a short distance and on a small scale; but in Germany travelling caravans of these little wildbeasts may be met with, which sometimes make a journey of thirty miles, taking four days to perform it. There is nothing new in this transmigration, for Columella tells us that the inhabitants of Achaia sent their hives into Attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers. The most pleasing picture, however, of all is that of the floating bee-houses of the Nile, mentioned by old and modern writers, and thus described by Dr. Bevan :

'In Lower Egypt, where the flower-harvest is not so early by several weeks as in the upper districts of that country, this practice of transportation is carried on to a considerable extent. About the end of October the hives, after being collected together from the different villages, and conveyed up the Nile, marked and numbered by the individuals to whom they belong, are heaped pyramidally upon the boats prepared to receive them, which, floating gradually down the river, and stopping at certain stages of their passage, remain there a longer or a shorter time, according to the produce which is afforded by the surrounding country. After travelling three months in this manner, the bees, having culled the perfumes of the orange-flowers of the Said, the essence of roses of the Faicum, the treasures of the Arabian jessamine, and a variety of flowers, are brought back about the beginning of February to the places from which they have been carried. The productiveness of the flowers at each respective stage is ascertained by the gradual descent of the boats in the water, and which is probably noted by a scale of measurement. This industry procures for the Egyptians delicious. honey and abundance of bees'-wax. The proprietors, in return, pay the boatmen a recompense proportioned to the number of hives which have thus been carried about from one extremity of Egypt to the other.' -p. 233.

Such a convoy of 4000 hives was seen by Niebuhr on the Nile, between Cairo and Damietta. An equally pleasing account is given by Mr. Cotton of the practice in France:

'In France they put their hives in a boat, some hundreds together, which floats down the stream by night, and stops by day. The bees go out in the morning, return in the evening; and when they are all back and quiet, on the boat floats. I have heard they come home to the ringing of a bell, but I believe they would come home just the same, whether the bell rings or no.'-Cotton, p. 89.

'I should like,' he continues, to see this tried on the Thames, for no river has more bee-food in spring; meadows, clover, beans, and lime-trees, in different places and times, for summer.'

Happy bees, whose masters are good enough to give them so delightful a treat! We can fancy no more pleasing sight, except

it be the omnibuses full of school-children that one sometimes sees on a fine summer's day making for the hills of Hampstead or Norwood.

Connected with their transmigration is the question of the extent of their flight. We believe that two miles may be considered as the radius of the circle of their ordinary range, though circumstances will occasionally drive them at least a mile more. We have read somewhere of a man who kept bees at the top of his house in Holborn, and wishing to find out where they pastured, he sprinkled them all with a red powder as they came out of the hive in the morning. Away he hied to Hampstead, thinking it the best bee-pasture at hand, and what was his delight at beholding among the multitudes of busy bees that he found there some of his own little fellows which he had 'incarnadined' in the morning! The apiary of Bonner, a great bee-observer, was situated in a garret in the centre of Glasgow; and that of Mr. Payne, the author of the Bee-Keeper's Guide'-a very useful and practical book, because short and simple-is in the middle of a large town.

Judging from the sweep that bees take by the side of a railroad train in motion, we should set down their pace about thirty miles an hour. This would give them four minutes to reach the extremity of their common range. A bee makes several journeys from and to the hive in a day; and Huish remarked that a honey-gathering bee was absent about thirty-five minutes, and a pollen-collector about half that time. The pollen or farina of flowers is doubtless much more plentiful and accessible than the honey. The same writer observed bees on the Isle of May, at the entrance of the Frith of Forth, though there was no hive kept on the island, which is distant four miles from the mainland. This is an amazing stretch of flight, considering the element over which they have to fly, the risk of finding food when they land, and the load they have to return with, if successful. Were they not wild bees of the island?

In speaking of the food of bees, we must not omit the Honeydew. This shining, gummy substance must have been often noticed in hot weather on the leaves of the lime and oak by the most incurious observer. The ancients considered it either as a deposition of the atmosphere or an exudation from the leaves of trees; for to these opinions the aërii mellis cœlestia dona,' and 'quercus sudabunt roscida mella,' of Virgil seem to refer. Gilbert White held the singular notion that it was the effluvia of flowers evaporated and drawn into the atmosphere by the heat of the weather, and then falling down again in the night with the dews that entangle them. Its origin is certainly one of those vexed

questions,

6

questions, which, like that of fairy rings,' yet require further light for a satisfactory explanation. At present it is impossible to reconcile the discrepancy in the observations of naturalists, some actually asserting that they have seen showers of it falling. To adjust the most common opinions, it is now generally admitted that there are two sources, if not two kinds; one being a secretion from the leaves of certain plants, the other a secretion from the body of an insect. Those little green insects, the aphides, which we commonly call blight, are almost always observed to accompany any large deposition of Honey-dew, and are said to have the power of jerking it to a great distance. The subject at the present moment is attracting great attention among our naturalists, and it is probable that the clash of opinions will bring out something very near the truth. That the aphides do secrete a saccharine fluid has been long known, and the bees are not their only fellowinsects who are fond of it. Their presence produces a land of milk and honey to the ants, who follow them wherever they appear, and actually herd them like cows and milk them !*

Much has been written upon the poisonous effects of certain plants, sometimes upon the honey, sometimes upon the bees themselves. Every schoolboy must remember the account given by Xenophon of the effect produced upon the Ten Thousand by the honey in the neighbourhood of Trebizond. The soldiers suffered in proportion to the quantity they had eaten ; some seemed drunken, some mad, and some even died the same

* What follows is from the delightful Introduction to Entomology' by Kirby and Spence. The loves of the ants and the aphides have been long celebrated; and that there is a connection between them you may at any time, in the proper season, convince yourself: for you will always find the former very busy on those trees and plants on which the latter abound; and, if you examine more closely, you will discover that their object in thus attending upon them is to obtain the saccharine fluid-which may well be denominated their milk-that they secrete. . . . This, however, is the least of their talents, for they absolutely possess the art of making them yield it at their pleasure; or, in other words, of milking them. On this occasion their antennæ are their fingers; with these they pat the abdomen of the aphis, on each side alternately, moving them very briskly; a little drop of fluid immediately appears, which the ant takes in its mouth. When it has milked one it proceeds to another, and so on till, being satiated, it returns to the nest. But you are not arrived at the most singular part of this history,-that the ants make a property of these cows, for the possession of which they contend with great earnestness, and use every means to keep them to themselves. Sometimes they seem to claim a right to the aphides that inhabit the branches of a tree or the stalks of a plant; and if stranger-ants attempt to share their treasure with them, they endeavour to drive them away, and may be seen running about in a great bustle, and exhibiting every symptom of inquietude and anger. Sometimes, to rescue them from their rivals, they take their aphides in their mouth: they generally keep guard round them, and when the branch is conveniently situated they have recourse to an expedient still more effectual to keep off interlopers-they enclose it in a tube of earth or other materials, and thus confine them in a kind of paddock near their nest, and often communicating with it.' How much of this is fanciful we must leave our readers to determine by their own observations; but let no man think he knows how to enjoy the country who has not studied the volumes of Kirby and Spence.

day.

day. (Anab. iv. 8.) This quality in the honey has been referred by Pliny and others to the poisonous nature of the rhododendron, which abounds in those parts; but from inquiries which we have made at Dropmore, and other spots abounding with this shrub, we cannot learn that any difference is perceived in the honey of those districts, or indeed that the common bee is ever seen to settle on its flowers. If the Kalmia latifolia be a native of Pontus, the danger is more likely to have arisen from that source, the honey derived from which has been known to prove fatal in several instances in America.

One remarkable circumstance about bees is the number of commodities of which they are either the collectors or confectioners. Besides honey and wax, there are two other distinct substances which they gather, bee-bread and propolis.

Before we knew better, we thought, probably with most of our readers, when we saw a bee tolling from every flower the virtuous sweets,' with his legs full of the dust of the stamens, that he was hurrying home with the wax to build his cell, or at least with the material wherewith to make that wax. We thought of Titania and her fairies, who for night tapers crop their waxen thighs,' and many other pretty things that poets have said and sung about them; or if in a more prosaic mood, we at least conceived that, if not furnishing fairy candles, they were laying the foundation for what Sir F. Trench calls the gentleman's light.' No such thing. Their hollow legs were filled with the pollen or farina of flowers, which has nothing whatever to do with the composition of wax, but constitutes the ambrosia of the hive-as honey does its nectar-their bee-bread, or rather, we should say, beepap, for it is entirely reserved for the use of their little ones. Old Butler had so long ago remarked that when they gather abundance of this stuff (pollen) they have never the more wax when they make most wax, they gather none of this.' In fact they store it up as food for the embryo bees, collecting from thirty to sixty pounds of it in a season; and in this matter alone they seem to be unthrift of their sweets,' and to want that shrewdness which never else fails them, for they often, like certain over-careful housewives with their preserves, store away more than they can use, which, in its decomposition, becomes to them a sore trouble and annoyance. They are said always to keep to one kind of flower in collecting it, and the light red colour of it will often detect them as the riflers of the mignionette-bed; but we have seen them late in the season with layers of different colours, and sometimes their whole body sprinkled with it, for they will at times roll and revel in a flower like a donkey on a dusty road. Whence, then, comes the wax? It is elaborated by the bee itself

from

from the honey by a chemistry beyond the ken of either Faraday or Liebig, being exuded in small scales from between the armourlike folds of their body. This was noticed almost contemporaneously by John Hunter and Huber, and confirmed by the most conclusive experiments of the latter. A legal friend, to whom we are indebted for much of our bee-law, thus records his own observation: I have often watched these fellows, hanging apparently torpid, after, as I think, a plentiful meal. Suddenly they make their whole persons vibrate like the prong of a tuningfork you cannot see their outline. This is a signal for one of the wax-collectors to run up quickly and fumble the lately-agitated gentleman with the instruments with which they hold the wax; and after collecting the scales, they hasten to mould them into the comb.' What would our bon-vivans give if they could thus, at their pleasure, shake off the effects of a Goldsmiths'-Hall dinner in the shape of a temporary fit of gout and chalk-stones?

Many in their schoolboy days, though we aver ourselves to be guiltless, having too often followed Titania's advice, and

Honey-bags stolen from the humble-bee,'

need not to have much told them of how they carry about them their liquid nectar. 'Kill me,' says Bottom to Cobweb, a redhipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle, and, good monsieur, bring me the honey-bag.' They never swarm without a good stock of honey in their inside, to enable them to make a fair start in their new housekeeping. The honey which they sip from the nectaries of the flowers probably undergoes some change, though it is but a slight one, before it is deposited in the cells. It was formerly considered a balm for all ills, though now deemed anything but wholesome when eaten in large quantities. The following are some of its virtues, besides others which we omit given by Butler. It is only wonderful that our grandfathers, living in the midst of such an universal medicine, should have ever died.

'Honey cutteth and casteth up flegmatic matter, and therefore sharpeneth the stomachs of them which by reason thereof have little appetite : it purgeth those things which hurt the clearness of the eyes; it nourisheth very much; it breedeth good blood; it stirreth up and preserveth natural heat, and prolongeth old age: it keepeth all things uncorrupt which are put into it; and therefore physicians do temper therewith such medicines as they mean to keep long; yea the bodys of the dead, being embalmed with honey, have been thereby preserved from putrefaction,' &c. &c.

The fourth product of the bee is propolis, or which we shall rather call bee-gum. It is at once the glue and varnish of their carpentry.

VOL. LXXI. NO. CXLI.

C