JANUARY 7 



But what rule is there without exception ? Once, and 

 once only, have I seen honey-bees, tempted forth by 

 the radiance of an early March morning, busy among 

 the chilly snowdrop bells. But my friend Mr. E. A, 

 Bowles tells me that bees often set to work among the 

 snowdrops in his charming garden at Waltham Cross. 

 Probably his snowdrops are later to flower and his bees 

 earlier astir than ours in the humid west. Lord 

 Avebury notes that 'Sprengel found that nectar was 

 secreted by the green parts of the perianth, and this 

 has been confirmed by Delpins and Knuth. It is not, 

 however, abundant. The flowers are principally visited 

 by hive-bees. ... In the absence of insect visits the 

 filaments relax, the anthers separate, and some of the 

 pollen drops on the viscid stigma.^ 



II 



I have just finished cleaning out a foul wooden pipe 



with the tail feathers of a woodpigeon, an 



^ " Feathers 



operation which nosmokermay pretermit who 



values his own health and CO mf or t. Mos t of us, probably, 



perform the lustration with no reflection more profound 



than to weigh the respective merits for the purpose of 



the pigeon's grey pointed flightfeather and its exquisitely 



clouded feather from the tail. For my part, I never 



can use either without feeling some shame in putting a 



structure so beautiful and complex to a use so sordid 



There is, indeed, an intellectual treat in store for any 



one who has not examined a feather under a strong 



lens or microscope. It is best to start with a fairly 



large one, say, a woodpigeon's primary or flight feather ; 



' British Flowering Plants, p. 417. 



