CHAPTER XVI 



GUESTS, WELCOME AND UNWELCOME 



Bees do more, on the whole, for the fertihzation of 

 flowers than any other insects; but though plentiful 

 throughout the plains of Europe, they become fewer and 

 fewer as the traveler ascends the Alps; and in the Tyrol, 

 at a height of from six thousand to nine thousand feet, he 

 may see hardly so much as a bee a day, and that of the 

 ''humble" species only. 



There is, it is true, the Ligurian, or yellow Alp-bee, 

 which is a mountain insect, and thrives in some of the 

 southern cantons of Switzerland up to a height of four 

 thousand five hundred feet; but still, the higher one goes 

 the fewer bees there are of any kind; and though there 

 are many beetles and flies, and very many moths and 

 butterflies, there are, on the whole, fewer insects of all 

 kinds in these higher regions; and in the highest, bees are 

 almost entirely absent. 



Yet the flowers of the high Alps are so intensely bright 

 in color that it is pretty certain they must be visited by 

 insects of some sort; and besides being of such vivid 

 colors, the flowers here are made still more striking by 

 being massed together in large beds, instead of being scat- 

 tered here and there. For the fewer the insects, the more 

 needful it is to economize their time and labor, and to 

 avoid the risk, which solitary plants would run, of being 

 overlooked altogether. Here, as elsewhere, "union is 



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