JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 149 
for last November it is called Symplocos evataegtotors. About an 
acre of this shrub formerly grew in a secluded bog near here, but it 
is now nearly exterminated. I used to believe it was a spirea or 
else Crataegus pruntfolia, The berries are bluish black, and insipid 
sweetish, and about the size of a hawthorn berry, and have two pits. 
Many years ago Lonicera hirsuta was found near here in great 
abundance, but that shrub, too, is nearly exterminated. In Wood’s 
Manual of American Botany the plant is named Z. Airsuta var. 
Goldianum, as the father of Mr. James Goldie, of Guelph, was said 
to have been.the first to bring the shrub to the notice of plant 
classifiers. 
The faculty of the honey bee for the construction of hextagonal 
cells seems to have existed in antediluvian ages, for among the drift 
fragments turned up by the plow in the soil of our fields fragments 
of well-preserved fossils of the Favosites Mtagarensis are quite fre- 
quently met with and spoken of locally as petrified honeycomb. In 
Nicholson’s ‘Palaeontology of Ontario” they are referred to the 
Guelph rock formation as follows : ‘‘ The hexagon cells in the fossil 
of unknown aeons past are identical in size and form with the wax 
cells of the hive bee of the present day, and there seems to be no 
perceptible difference in geometrical design with the comb cells of 
our common wasps and hornets.” A recent writer in one of our bee 
journals thus speaks of the hexagon : ‘“‘ Put a soap bubble on a plate, 
and surround it with six other bubbles ; the equal tension of the 
meeting films will make the central bubble a hexagon, just as the 
thin wax with the bees working in it and pressing against each other 
makes it a hexagon. O, the marvellous geometry of the honey bee 
and also of the foam flecks on troubled waters !” 
The writer above alluded to goes on by saying: “It is as cer- 
tain as anything can be, that at one time the bee was simply male 
and female, but somehow they came to see the advantage of com- 
munal effect.” 
The queen of a bee-hive does not rule; she lays eggs, and a 
very prolific queen has the power to lay two or three thousand eggs 
in a day twice her own weight. She possesses the power, too, of 
choosing which of her offspring shall be drones (or males) and 
which shall be workers. Some have thought that this was auto- 
matic, but the queen will lay worker eggs in drone cells if she thinks 
