6 



My story teaches (every tale should bear 



A fitting moral) that the wise may find 



In trifles, light as atoms in the air, 



Some useful lesson to enrich the mind ; 



Some truth designed to profit or to please. 



As Israel's King learned wisdom from the bees ! 



Apropos of bees and apiculture, I learned the other day from the 

 Board of Trade, that a bee must visit 218,750 flowers for each ounce 

 of honey gathered, and that the largest beekeeper in the world is 

 Mr. Harbicon, of California, who possesses 6,000 hives, supplying 

 200,000 lbs. of honey per annum. The United States is the 

 greatest honey producing country in the world ; it has 2,800,000 

 hives belonging to 70,000 rearers, and producing annually 61,000,000 

 lbs. of honey. An enemy of the bees is a friend of mine, the larvae 

 of the moth Galleria cerella, creeping into the hive and boring into 

 the honey cells, feed upon the honey ; they make silken cocoons in 

 the cells from which the moths emerge, as you may see in this case. 



In the two-fold objects for which the Field -Naturalist part of 

 this Association exists, namely, the praise of nature by our ob- 

 servation of it in our excursions, and in the examination into its 

 constituent parts, we have the encouragement of a greater teacher 

 than the two I. have just mentioned ; He who bid us consider the 

 lilies of the field ; how they grow ; that they toil not, neither do 

 they spin, and that yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 

 one of these ; and in so considering do we not forget our toil and 

 the care of to-morrow whilst enjoying the collective and diversified 

 enquiries which occupy us in our monthly Excursions, both amongst 

 the lilies of the field and the birds and denizens of the air and 

 landscape ; but our attention and pleasure is not confined to the 

 history which is termed natural ; there is also a living history, so 

 to speak, of our own race as seen in the various forms of sepulture, 

 defense, worship, and of later times, of residence, with which our 

 County abounds. 



To these, not only our interest but our study and care is given, 

 and the County owes us no small debt of gratitude for bringing 

 before it, by patient and long continued investigation and descrip- 

 tion, the instruction to be derived and imparted by those of our 

 members who so very ably and lovingly give themselves to the 

 duty. 



These are our raisons d'etre for the establishment and continuation 

 of this Association, whose work last year will I think compare 

 favourably with that of the past, and whose future is full of 



