276 NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS. 
bees use it to close all the crevices of their habitation; they 
also cover the bodies of interlopers with it, such as large in- 
sects, snails, etc., which enter the hive, and whose bodies 
are too heavy for them to carry out; and with this substance, 
also, they glue their combs to the side walls of the hive. 
The distinguished apiarian, Huish, speaking of the pro- 
polis, says, ‘It is a resin, soluble in spirit of wine and oil of 
turpentine. Independently of the use to which it is applied 
in medicine as a digestive, it has been discovered by ex- 
periment that, dissolved in the above solvents, it forms an 
excellent substitute for the varnish which is used in giving 
the color of gold to silver, or to tin made into foil. If, for 
example, it be incorporated with mastic or sandarac it 
would be excellent in the gilding of leather, etc.” 
The pollen of flowers, called also farina or ambrosia, and 
erithace and cerinthe by Pliny, is, as may be daily demon- 
strated, the real food of the bees, and therefore deserves the 
name which has been given to it, of bee-bread. This dust, 
which is found on the top of the stamens of all flowers, and 
which the bees collect and transport in their fosse to their 
hives, is their real food and nourishment, and also the real 
material from which they manufacture both the propolis 
and the wax. 
But how these little creatures transform the pollen into 
wax is a very different matter, and a question which has 
puzzled the most learned naturalists from the time of Aris- 
totle, 300 B.c., to the present century. It is true that there 
are trees and shrubs which furnish a wax-like substance; 
for instance, the wax-tree, or bayberry (Myrica cerifera), 
found in all our Northern and Southern States, from the 
berries of which we obtain, by boiling them, a green waxy 
substance, which is used for making candles, and of which 
berries one pound will make two ounces of wax; but from 
the pollen of flowers no one has ever been able to make any 
kind of wax. If bees, returning from their excursions to 
