72 Transactions of the [Sess. 



gins of course to lay Ligurian eggs, and as the old black Bees die 

 off, the hive becomes in a few months a pure Ligurian colony, and 

 this practice has enabled us to form a very good idea of the dura- 

 tion of life of a worker Bee, the average of which is found not to 

 exceed a few months. 



It may be well to enumerate a few of the flowers most frequented 

 by Bees. I will merely mention some of the most important. In 

 the early spring the Crocus and Willow are perhaps the first, and 

 much pollen is procured from these, and also from the blossonis of 

 fruit-trees. Easpberry and Gooseberry blossoms seem great favour- 

 ites with Bees, and Turnip flowers, and all the Brassica tribe ; then 

 Kibes, Lime, Arabis alpinus, Limnanthes Douglasii, Wallflower, 

 Mignonette, White Clover, Melilotus leucantha ; and in the autumn 

 Heather, Ivy, G-arden Balsam, &c. A full list of Bee flowers is given 

 in a recent number of the ' British Bee Journal.' One fact may not 

 be generally known, namely, that a Bee, when gathering honey, 

 does not go promiscuously from one flower to another — for instance, 

 from White Clover to Mignonette. If she begins on Mignonette, 

 she goes to no other flower till she returns to the hive. You can 

 notice this at any time, and I have no doubt your observations will 

 confirm my statement. 



We will now glance at some of the enemies of Bees. You are 

 aware, from the paper I wrote last j^ear on the Flycatcher, that I do 

 not consider our small birds as enemies to Bees. That beautiful 

 bird the Bee-eater [llerops apiaster) is always spoken of as a 

 great destroyer of them, but it never visits Scotland, and is an 

 extremely rare visitant to England, where unfortunately its attrac- 

 tive plumage soon renders it a specimen for our museums. It is 

 possible its long bill may enable it to kill Worker-Bees with im- 

 pimity. Wasps are great enemies to Bees. I have known weak 

 colonies entirely destroyed by them. Mice will sometimes in 

 winter, when the Bees are almost helpless, make sad havoc with 

 the combs, but the entrance of the hive ought never to be suf- 

 ficiently large to admit them. Snails in their shells sometimes 

 crawl into a hive, and the Bees, not being able to 'eject them, with 

 propolis fix the edges of the shell to the floor-board, and the mol- 

 lusc is suffocated, and so hermetically sealed that its remains can- 

 not be deleterious or offensive. The Wax Moth is an enemy, for 

 the larv£e do great injury to the combs ; and the Death' s-Head Moth 

 is also mentioned as doing much mischief in hives, but this splen- 

 did Moth is seldom seen in Scotland. By far the greatest enemies 

 the Bees have are unquestionably human, or more properly inhuman, 

 beings, who, not content with taking a portion of the honey the in- 

 sects have stored, still dig holes in the garden, in which sulphur is 

 burned, and the hive placed over the fumes, and the whole colony 

 suffocated, and the dead and dying buried out of sight. We will 



