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TINEIDiE — CLOTHES'-MOTH, BEE-MOTH, ETC. 249 



gauze, and has been worn as a robe over her court dress by 

 the Queen of Bavaria.^ 



Authors are of opinion that the ancients possessed some 

 secret for preserving garments from the Moth, Tinia tajDet- 

 zella. We are told the robes of Servius Tullius were found 

 in perfect preservation at the death of Sejanus, an interval 

 of more than five hundred years. Pliny gives as a precau- 

 tion "to lay garments on a coffin;" others recommend "can- 

 tharides hung up in a house, or wrapping them in a lion's 

 skin" — "the poor little insects," says Reaumur, "being 

 probably placed in bodily fear of this terrible animal."^ 



Moufet says : "They that sell woollen clothes use to wrap 

 up the skin of a bird called the king's-fisher among them, 

 or else hang one in the shop, as a thing by a secret antipa- 

 thy that Moths cannot endure."^ 



Among the various contrivances resorted to as a safe- 

 guard against the Bee-moth, Galleria cereana, Fabricius, 

 perhaps the most ingenious is that, mentioned by Lang- 

 stroth, of "governing the entrances of all the hives by a 

 long lever-like hen-roost, so that they may be regularly 

 closed by the crowing and cackling tribe when they go to 

 bed at night, and opened again when they fly from their 

 perch to greet the merry morn."* 



An intelligent man informed Langstroth that he paid ten 

 dollars to a "Bee-quack" professing to have an infallible 

 secret for protecting Bees against the Moth ; and, after the 

 quack had departed with his money, learned that the secret 

 consisted in "always keeping strong stocks."^ 



1 Maff. of Nat. Hist., i. 66. 



2 Harper's New Monthly Mag., xxii. 41. 



3 Theair. Ins., p. 274. Topsel's Hist, of Beasts, p. 1100. 



4 On the Honey-Bee, p. 248. 

 ^ Ibid., p. 238, note. 



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