REAWAKENINGS 



THE welcome one gives in Spring to the returning 

 swallow and cuckoo soon broadens. There are many 

 old friends, and there is a thrill in the first sight of 

 each of them. For this one has been in the Far South, this 

 other in disguise ; one has been in hiding, and another has 

 gone down in sleep to the very gates of death. As an in- 

 stance of those that are reawakened, we may take the 

 humble-bees, which reappear in April or May. Queens or 

 females, they are sole survivors of last year's brood, 

 who have passed the Winter at rest in some sheltered hole 

 in a mossy bank. 



They fly to the early flowering plants, such as the 

 willows, from whose fragrant catkins they get their first 

 meal. There is a dwarf willow on the golf-links, one of the 

 smallest of trees, not more than a couple of inches in height, 

 and it is there that we find the newly roused queens year 

 after year. After some recuperation they look out for a 

 suitable nesting-place, where they make a more or less bowl- 

 like cradle of wax, containing a small quantity of pollen 

 mixed up with nectar. In this mass several eggs are laid, 

 and then the cradle is closed. After a short rest the queen 

 goes on to make a second cradle or cell connected with the 

 first, and then a third, and so on, each with its batch of eggs 

 and a small store of food. The store is so scanty, however, 

 that the developing larvae soon exhaust it, and the queen has 

 to feed them through a hole made in the lid of the cradle. 



After a month or so has elapsed the first brood emerges, 



