HYMENOPTERA. 



459 



De Candolle found that Narbonne honey owes its peculiar flavour to 

 the fact that the bees feed upon rosemary flowers. Bees are particularly 

 fond of alpine flowers, and delight to visit the sedums. Heather also 

 yields much honey to bees, and beekeepers in Yorkshire carry their 

 hives in a waggon to the moors when the heather blossoms, and return 

 with them to their residence when it is out of flower. 



The hum of bees is exciting to the nervous system of some persons. 

 Gilbert White describes a boy who was a very Merops Apiaster. I 

 have known such a case, in a gentleman who is now an officer in the 

 army and passionately fond of music, who when a child was always in 

 search of bees, and generally had some in paper boxes in his pocket. 



It is not a fitting place to consider the economy of a bee-hive, or 

 we should be led with Shakspeare to say : — 



" So work the honey bees : 

 Creatures that by a rule of nature teach 

 The art of order to a peopled kingdom." 



Shakspeare, Henry IV. 



At my garden the working bees (fig. 1017) kill the drones about the 

 third week in August, when the ground around the hives is literally 

 covered with their dead bodies. 



The Humble-bees {Bombits terrestis, No. i ; Bombus luceriim, No. 4, 

 fig. 1018) are of service to us, 

 and it is interesting to observe 

 them open the valve of the 

 flower of the snapdragon and 

 enter therein. Curtis states 

 that these bees damage the 

 flower by piercing it instead of 

 entering at its mouth. Al- 

 though we have abundance of 



snapdragons and numerous Fig. 1018.— HumWe-bees. 



humble-bees, this observation has not b^en verified in my garden. 



In our neighbourhood there are many solitary bees, which make 

 holes in a sand-bank, in which they deposit their young. 



