30 OPINIONS OF MR. DUNCAN. 



defend his property, and an attacking bee has therefore the 

 greater chance of succeeding in his design. 



Eager as we are in our inquiries after truth in everything 

 appertaining to the bee, we cannot refrain from admitting into 

 our pages, the following singular statements of Mr. Duncan. 

 Speaking of the labours of the bee, he says, " their labours 

 appear unceasing, yet do the weary labourers sometimes 

 snatch an interval of repose : during the busy season, we have 

 seen hundreds of the workers retiring into their cells and exhibiting 

 all the marks of profound sleep; this fact is very easily observ- 

 able, especially in those cells which are constructed, as some- 

 times, againstthe glass, and when that substance forms one side 

 of the cell. There they are, the fatigued labourers stretched 

 at full length with their heads at the bottom, and every limb 

 apparently in a relaxed state, while the little body is seen heaving 

 gently from the process of respiration j" and could Mr. Dun- 

 can suppose for a moment that he could succeed in imposing 

 such an extraordinary fiction as the actual truth upon his 

 readers, that the bees enter the cells for the purpose of tak- 

 ing a nap ? We know that there are only two purposes for 

 which the bee enters a cell, and the most probable reason of 

 the hundreds entering the cells, as witnessed by Mr. Duncan, 

 was for the purpose of disgorging the honey which they had 

 collected in the fields, but even Huber in the most extrava- 

 gant of his apiarian visions never ventured so far as to make 

 his bees go to sleep. " There they are," says Mr. Duncan, 

 " stretched at full length with their heads at the bottom," and 

 when, we will presume to ask Mr. Duncan, did he everbehold 

 a bee, stretched at full length with his head at the bottom ? 

 The position of the sleeping bees, as described by Duncan, 

 is the natural one of the bees on degurgitating the honey, 

 but as to sleep, no bee ever yet fell asleep in a cell, or out of a 

 cell. The bees will rest from their labours, huddled closely 

 together, but the cells of a hive were never yet applied to the 

 uses of a dormitory, and we will venture to affirm that sleep 



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