ARCADIA 
XIII 
Its Head a Busy Man. 
Dr. Bigelow betrays in all his utter- 
ance a persistent confidence that some- 
where at some time somebody will so 
loosen up on his bank account as to 
place within his use a fund consistent- 
ly ample to found a Nature University 
that will live on when the present field 
workers are freed from this life’s ener- 
gies. It is with much sympathy I con- 
fess on behalf of my friend, Dr. Bige- 
low, when I beheld the amount of labor 
laid out and in prospect before him at 
his desk and in the laboratory, the 
work in hand in management, of duties 
attached to the young ArcAdiA, the 
publication of The Guide to Nature, 
responsive calls, and almost the last 
telling me, “We answer any question 
of a nature character the people want 
to know.” 
Dr. Bigelow has, besides his many 
personal friends, a large acquaintance 
with some others — Mr. Liberality, Mr. 
Kindness, Mr. Cordiality and their 
country cousins and aunts. 
Aunt Hannah. 
Observations of Nature in ArcAdiA. 
There are seven gray squirrels in 
ArcAdiA. We have had nearly that 
number for several years. They have 
the freedom of the premises, and oc- 
cupy a little house in one of our trees 
and in the back yard of one of our 
neighbors, and for a part of the year 
they have nests of leaves in the tree 
tops. They amuse themselves by 
scampering over the premises as well 
as over a large part of Sound Beach. 
They are fond of running on the tele- 
phone cables. 
This year they have acquired an en- 
tirely new habit — that of taking an ear 
of sweet corn from the garden and 
carrying it to the top of the fence or 
even into the tree top where they strip 
off the husks in shreds, eating the corn 
and apparently all of the cob. We have 
never yet found a cob that they have 
dropped but only nearly pulverized 
pieces. There are some indications that 
they eat the pith as well as the corn, 
chewing it off as they would gnaw a 
nut. It is interesting to note that in all 
their audacity in helping themselves 
to our corn they have not left some- 
where on the premises a corncob and 
apparently not all the husks. It is pos- 
sible that they may be using the husks 
to line their nests, yet on that point we 
have no direct evidence other than that 
the amount of husks around the 
grounds does not equal the number of 
ears that they are taking. 
This is evidently a new venture for 
the squirrels and they are in the stages 
of learning how to climb up a grape- 
vine arbor and carry with them an ear 
of corn. It was interesting recently to 
witness the slow dawning of the fact 
that a corncob may be carried much 
more easily by the end than by the 
middle. A squirrel with a cob held in 
the middle made repeated efforts to go 
up the wire netting on which the grape- 
vines are growing. Finally he discov- 
ered that the logical method is to 
hold the ear by one end and climb up 
backward. Since the squirrel family 
and probably none of its predecessors 
had ever had any experience with the 
ears of green corn there was something 
in their conduct that approached pretty 
closely to reason and invention. 
The frequent statement, made by 
those who do not keep bees but do have 
grapes, that the bees ruin their grapes 
is without the slightest foundation in 
fact so far as the extensive crop of 
grapes near our large Apiary is con- 
cerned. We have never had a complaint 
from Sound Beach of bees eating 
grapes, but we did have one case where 
the people thought, though incorrectly, 
that the bees punctured the peaches. It 
was found that the punctures were 
made presumably by birds and the bees 
merely helped themselves to the exud- 
ing juice. I have read the statement in 
bee journals that this explains the bees’ 
attention to the grapes, but here in 
ArcAdiA they are not guilty of even 
that. There are bushels of grapes with- 
in a few rods of the Apiary and never 
yet have we seen a bee on a grape. 
They will not notice the grapes even 
when a bunch is laid at the entrance of 
the hive. We are planting sixty more 
grapevines this year. We feel confident 
that they will be immune from inter- 
ference by bees. It seems strange that 
such a myth ever gained such credence. 
Barnum was right when he said that 
people like to be fooled and delight in 
fooling themselves. 
