100 Instincts and Habits of Bees. 



I thought if the hive bees passed them by — for hive bees rarely 

 touch the most tempting flowers near the hive — it might at 

 least happen that a red-hippecl humble bee would probe their 

 empty nectaries and make a fool of himself for my diversion. 

 I patiently bear the shame that overwhelmed me, because the 

 bees are the gainers thereby ; I will humble myself that they 

 may be exalted, and confess that the trick failed most mise- 

 rably. No hive or humble bee, no butterfly or moth ever 

 visited one of my paper or calico deceptions ; I sat for hours 

 watching ; I tried my own skill in imitating flowers which the 

 bees were already busy at, but all to no purpose, they treated 

 my baits with proper scorn, and told me they were not to be 

 caught with such absurdities. But it at last struck me that if 

 colour did not attract them, odour might ; and so I dropped 

 into a number of flowers a little clean liquid honey, and within 

 a few niimites it was smelt out, abstracted, and carried away, 

 and, with the departure of one bee laden, two or three empty 

 ones came to take their place, and the very worst of the calico 

 flowers was as much favoured as the best imitations, so long as 

 they afforded a store of nectar. It is, no doubt, the odours of 

 flowers that attract bees to them and enable them to distinguish 

 those that afford a harvest from those that are destitute of 

 honey. It is, no doubt, the odour also that guides a bee to 

 the flowers of the same genus or family of plants, and renders 

 for the time the flowers of other genera or families obnoxious ; 

 for if a bee begins the day by visiting a cruciferous plant, such 

 as rape or mustard, it continues to work among rape or mustard 

 flowers throughout the day, and will not alight upon a salvia or 

 a clover blossom. It is this habit of visiting during an excur- 

 sion only the flowers of the same family, that renders the bee 

 so expert and efficient a fertilizer, for the pollen she gathers 

 by brushing the stamens to probe the nectary is diffused where 

 it will exercise a vital influence — that is, among stigmas of 

 flowers of the same race, and oftentimes of the same species. 

 If you observe bees going in laden with pollen, you will never 

 see mixtures ; one has red pollen, another yellow, another 

 amber, another white, and so all day long ; and when they 

 come dusted all over, as often happens when the thorns are 

 in bloom, the dust is homogeneous. It is no mixture of indis- 

 criminate and unbotanical collectings. 



It has been the fashion of late to test the wisdom of Shake- 

 speare's analysis by particular references to historical, theolo- 

 gical, literary, and scientific subjects in his works. Look at 

 his references to bees, and wonder. Virgil's fourth Georgic is 

 of course, with all its absurdities, the corner-stone of apiarian 

 literature j but Shakespeare kuew the bees as well as ho knew 

 mankind, and when he deduces from their history a parallel or 



