WHY DO BEES SW.VHM ? 81 



the cause of her assuming this attitude, the bees were affected by 

 it; all hung down their heads, and remained motionless. The 

 queen confined in the second cell had not yet left it, and was 

 heard to hum several times." Undoubtedly for hum he means 

 pipe, or clack as he terms it. If the piping is heard in the evening, 

 every preparation can be made to receive the swarm next day. 

 There will sure to be a swarm issue forth. I have known, after 

 hearing the piping over night, a swarm to come forth on a bright 

 morning; afterwards, the sky becoming overcast, they again re- 

 turned to the hive, and issued out on the day following. I have 

 also heard the piping, and on the next morning have seen the 

 swarm rise in the air, and before they alighted re-enter, and not 

 to swarm again during that season. I suppose the cause was a 

 fight to a finish between the rival queens. 



Why do bees swiairm ? Why does a hen sit, rear her chickens, 

 and then leave them to scratch for themselves ? Why are the mem- 

 bers of the smaller feathered race so solicitous for the safety of their 

 callow nestlings and so anxious to protect them when they leave 

 the nest as perchers, and in a few weeks afterwards, are just as 

 anxious to vent out their rage upon their own offspring, as if they 

 were the greatest strangers, should they approach the old domain ? 

 And why do members of the vegetable world bloom, bear seed, and 

 scatter it far and wide ? Some seeds are armed with little hook- 

 lets, that hitch in the coats of animals that browse upon the parent 

 plants, and are thus carried and dropped miles away ; others are 

 coated with adhesive matter which answers the same purpose as 

 the hooklets ; other seeds again are bedecked with delicately buoy- 

 ant down, as in the thistles, and, being thus armed with sails, 

 are wafted far away from the neighbourhood of their nativity. 

 Are not the various methods Nature has adopted to distribute 

 the animal and vegetable kingdom analogous to swarming for the 

 purpose of replenishing the earth ? True some go away into a 

 far country singly, others again gregariously. What bee-keeper 

 has not looked at a bed of thistles when the wind is blowing, and, 

 seeing the seeds caught up by their downy attendants, conceived 

 the idea that they rise into the air like a swarm of bees ? And 

 what is "to swarm"? An Anglo-Saxon word, meaning to ascend 

 or go up. In some parts of England the word is so used to this 

 day. "Shall I swarm the tree and get that bird's nest?" was an 

 expression used when I was a boy. Now we use the word as mean- 

 ing a great number, or a great multitude. 



