oo 
1880. | -The Tongue of the Honey Bee. 279 
cleaned for nineteen meshes. Many trials gave the same result. 
This then shows why Italians can gather, and often do collect 
from flowers which fail utterly to attract the black bees. The 
nectar is beyond their reach. 
It would seem from the above that American-bred bees have 
shorter tongues than those direct from Italy. It seems very 
probable that “ natural selection,” the very law which raised the 
Italians to their position of superiority, also gave to them their 
longer tongues: Shut up in their mountain home, a mere isolated 
basin, where competition must have been very excessive, nature 
took advantage of every favorable variation and developed those 
striking excellences peculiar to the Italian. During these ages 
there was no kindly bee;master possessed of the intelligence suffi- 
cient to nurse the weaklings, nor any “ Dollar Queen business ” 
to stimulate indiscriminate breeding, and the weak died victims to 
starvation. And so we are indebted to the stern, inexorable law 
of nature for the incomparable breeding which wrought out such 
admirable results in far-famed Liguria. Unquestionably the 
crowded apiaries of Austria and Germany have heightened the 
“struggle for life,’ and had a similar tendency to develop supe- 
rior excellence in the European black bees. It is more than 
probable that the German bees of crowded Europe have longer 
tongues and are generally superior to the same in America, where 
they have long been favored with broad floral areas and compara- 
tive absence of competition. I should expect that this very law 
might have developed varieties of the black race which are supe- 
rior to others of the same race. It is more than possible that 
“survival of the fittest” explains the origin of the superior varie- 
ties which are said to exist in various provinces of Europe. For 
the same reason we should surely expect superior excellence in 
the Cyprian bees. Crowded as they have been for long years or 
ages in their small island home, the principle of “ survival of the — 
fittest” must have been working powerfully to weed out the infe- 
rior and to preserve and make stronger the superior. And so the © 
great poet has well said: “ Sweet are the uses of adversity.” 
From the above considerations it seems obvious, that would we © 
perpetuate the excellencies given us by the skillful breeding of 
nature, though we may not destroy all the feeble, as nature has done, 
we must assuredly study and observe so closely, that we shall 
know of a surety which are our very ee queens, and be even 
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