AMERICAN BEES. 29 



and ingenuity, but in this way affords good sport as 

 well as profit. 



You may try and find a wasp-nest some day 

 much in the same way, for wasps, as well as bees, fly 

 in a straight line when returning home. There is no 

 loitering idly, remember, on the way, as very often we 

 see in the case of boys and girls when sent on an 

 errand — stopping and playing by the roadside, and 

 forgetting for a time what they have been sent to do. 

 No ; the bees go straight, and go as fast as they can. 

 They have their work to do, and they do it. 



How they are able to make this straight ' bee- 

 line ' home, even when they have never been the way 

 before, is a great mystery. It is, indeed, by what we 

 call their instinct, although we little know, perhaps, 

 what instinct is. We only know that it seems in 

 some way a marvellous power given them by the 

 Creator, which, in many respects, almost supplies the 

 place of the powers of reason given to man, and often 

 enables them to do what man with all his reason 

 never could. 



It is the same instinct whfch is found even yet 

 more wonderfully in some animals, and especially in 

 dogs, who will find their way home for one or even 

 two hundred miles across a strange country, where 

 they have never been before. 



A cat will sometimes do the same. The following 

 story was given me on good authority : — A cat was 

 taken by a lady from London to Lowestoft, on the 

 Suffolk coast, by railway, a distance of a hundred 

 and eighteen miles. There it escaped, and in a fort- 

 night's time appeared at its old home in London, 



