526 Miscellaneous. 
morning with a face full of importance, to inquire if we were aware 
of the depredations that the Tomtits were committing on the Bee- 
hives. He had, he said, been watching them for some time, and 
the way in which the Tits proceed is to strike hard with their bills 
on the boards on which the hives are placed; this noise awakens 
the bees, who come forth to learn from whence it proceeds, and their 
artful and merciless assailants immediately pounce upon and kill all 
who are not fortunate enough to escape, and either eat them on the 
spot or fly off with them to a neighbouring tree or shrub, and there 
devour them; and in this way great numbers are destroyed. The 
child further told us that he had witnessed the same attacks on his 
father’s bees at their cottage among the woods, and that his parents 
are in the habit of setting traps for the cannibals, and he requested 
to be furnished with mouse-traps; these were given to him, and he 
placed them on the board at the mouth of each hive, and has already 
succeeded in killing five or six of the felons, who have thus paid with 
their lives for their murderous thievery.”—F'rom a Correspondent in 
West Kent *. 
Larus glaucus :—Larus capistratus.—Mr. 8. Mummery, of Bath- 
road, Margate, informs us of his having shot at Kingsgate, on the 6th 
of January (the weather being snowy with a strong easterly wind), a 
Glaucous Gull, one of the finest specimens he had ever seen, a male 
in full plumage, and now in the Margate Museum.—Also that two 
fine specimens of the Brown-headed Gull had been captured; one of 
them having been shot at Westgate-bay, between Margate and Bir- 
chington. This was alone and very tame, allowing Mr. Mummery’s 
friend, who shot it, to approach very near before it attempted to fly. 
The other was shot by himself near Kingsgate. Both are males: 
one of these is now in the museum, and the other is for sale. In 
reference to Mr. Jenyns’s remark that the food and nidification of 
this Gull are unknown, Mr. Mummery states that they feed on 
small fish that are near the water’s edge, such as dace, &c., also on 
shrimps and worms. ‘Their nests they build in the high cliffs of 
Dover, where specimens in full plumage can be obtained in the 
spring; as also their eggs, by lowering a man over the cliffs. The 
birds are to be seen flying about half-way up in great abundance. 
Mr. Mummery offers, in the exercise of his occupation as a col- 
lector, to furnish those who may apply to him with nearly the whole 
of the aquatic birds in their different stages of plumage, with their 
eggs, in exchange for inland birds. 
A strange News-Carrier.—A friend lately arrived from sea has 
furnished us with the following information, copied from a shipping 
* [Our esteemed correspondent will find that Mr. Yarrell (Birds, vol. i. 
341) states of the Marsh Titmouse, that “ it is said to be an enemy to bees ;” 
and mentions, under Parus ceeruleus, an item in a churchwarden’s aceount 
for seventeen dozen of Tomtits’ heads. They are said to crush the bees with 
great adroitness transversely in their beak repeatedly, so as to escape being 
stung.—Eb. ] 
