INSTINCT -INDUSTRY PARTIALITIES. 251 



It has been observed, that bees are endowed with 

 the faculty of knowing the persons familiar to them, 

 which, indeed, seems sufficiently obvious from their 

 power of distinguishing individually, their own kind, 

 and their friends from their enemies. Instinct has 

 placed them not only under one of the most regular 

 of commonwealths, with a queen at their head, but 

 instructed them so thoroughly, in the division of 

 labour, and each of them in every separate branch 

 of it, that each one indiscriminately engages in that 

 part which may, at the moment, require his industry. 

 Bees are weather-wise, and generally remain close 

 at home, on their sense of the approach of unfa- 

 vourable weather. Like all armed insects, they are 

 passionate, revengeful, and active, but will scarcely 

 ever attack keepers who have been acknowledged 

 by them, and who take care constantly to approach 

 them quietly, and without roughness or cause of 

 agitation. It appears, however, to be an ascertained 

 fact, that there are persons who, probably from the 

 peculiar scent of their perspiration, are either pleas- 

 ing and attractive, or disgusting to the olfactory 

 nerves of bees. Thence it has occasionally hap- 

 pened, that a swarm of bees shall have alighted upon 

 the human head and face, and the patient being of 

 the favoured class, not the slightest injury has been 

 sustained ; on the contrary, it has full often occurred, 

 that persons have been stung dangerously, and as it 

 would seem revengefully, by these insects. It is 

 perhaps the same with respect to strangers visiting 

 an Apiary. 



There are VARIETIES of the bee, more, I think, in 



M6 



