INSTINCT OF INSECTS, 501 
to detach from their mandibles, and to apply to the sur- 
face which they are varnishing, by repeated estates of 
these organs and of the fore feet *. 
In their out-of-door operations several distinct instincts 
are concerned. By one they are led to extract honey 
from the nectaries of flowers; by another to collect pol- 
len after a process involving very complicated manipu- 
lations, and requiring a singular apparatus of brushes 
and baskets; and that must surely be considered a third, 
which so remarkably and beneficially restricts each ga- 
thering to the same plant>. It is clearly a distinct in- 
stinct which inspires bees with such dread of rain, that 
even ifa cloud pass before the sun, they return to the hive 
in the greatest haste ©; and that seems to me not less so, 
which teaches them to find their way back to their home 
after the most distant and intricate wanderings. When 
bees have found the direction in which their hive lies, 
Huber says they fly.to it with an extreme rapidity, and 
as straight as a ball from a musket: and if their hives 
were always in open situations, one might suppose, as 
Huber seems inclined to think, that it is by their sight 
they are conducted to them. But hives are frequently 
found in small gardens embowered in wood, and in the 
midst of villages surrounded and interspersed with trees 
and buildings, so as to make it impossible that they can 
be seen from a distance. If you had been with me in 
1815, in the famous Pays de Waes in Flanders—where 
the country is a perfect flat, and the inhabitants so en- 
amoured either of the beauty or profit of trees, that their 
fields, which are rarely above three acres in extent, are 
@ Huber, ii. 275—. » See above, p. 182, 
¢ Huber, t. 306. 4 Ibid. ii. 367. 
