52 OUR FEATHERED FRIENDS. 
noticed swarms of strange looking black-and-blue flies 
all over the grass. We saw these flies dart out to the 
front of the hive and kill the bees faster than the birds 
could have done it. | 
Waiting a little longer, we found that the birds were 
on the watch for these flies, and it was these they were 
catching instead of the bees at that particular time. 
A certain naturalist, who has spent a good deal of 
time trying to find out if the bee-birds do really kill 
bees, has told us a little secret, which is very interest- 
ing and may lead some other people to investigate the 
matter. He says that he has never found a worker-bee 
in the stomach of a bee-bird, though he has examined 
a great many of them. He has found only drones, 
which the worker bees are very glad to get rid of and 
often kill, because they are lazy and eat honey without 
gathering any for winter. 
Perhaps one reason why the bee-bird prefers the 
drone to the worker is because the drones have no 
stings. 
By all this you see that it pays us to take some 
trouble to find out all the good there is about anybody. 
However, it cannot be denied that the king-birds do 
eat bees, when they can find nothing they like better. 
We have often wondered what they do with so many 
stings, and why they are not poisoned by them. We 
have not examined a king-bird’s throat to find out this 
secret, but a friend of ours did look at the throat of a 
toad which persisted in eating his bees on warm summer 
