UNDER THE MAPLES 



II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE 



Maeterlinck, in his *'Life of the Bee" resists the 

 conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more 

 intelligent than honey bees: 



If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir 

 John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle 

 down horizontally with its base to the window, you will 

 find that the bees will persist till they die of exhaustion 

 or hunger in their endeavors to discover an issue through 

 the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will 

 all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite 

 side. 



The flies are more intelligent than the bees 

 because their problems of life are much more com- 

 plicated; they are fraught with many more dangers; 

 their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have 

 very few natural enemies. There are no bee- 

 catchers in the sense that there are scores of fly- 

 catchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the 

 worker bees. The kingbird is sometimes called the 

 *'bee martin" because he occasionally snaps up 

 the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon 

 the flies; the swallows sweep them up in the air, the 

 swifts scoop them in, while, besides the so-called 

 flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the 

 vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more 

 or less upon them. Try to catch a big blow-fly 

 upon the window-pane and see how diflicult the 

 trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. 



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