It is the noise of bees in swarming 
that keeps them within eainliot of one 
another; and this noise never wholly sub¬ 
sides till all.have clustered in a mass like a 
bunch of grapes on the branch of a tree. If 
bees wore deaf, sounds would bo of no avail; 
but many different, instances and occasions 
could be named in which sound is a very use¬ 
ful instrument in the economy of a hive of 
bees. 
Bees will follow the sound of their own 
hive in a dark place and in daylight as 
hounds follow a fox. It were an easy matter 
to make bees on the floor of a house at night; 
follow the noise of a strong hive from room 
to room over the whole house, and even from 
one end of a garden to the other end. 
4, Taste.—The sense ot taste in bees does 
not admit of doubt, though we know very 
little about it. The fact that bees resort to 
in which are dissolved caselue, sugar of milk 
and certain inorganic salts. Iu this solution 
is suspended, in the form of an emulsion, 
from three to four per cent, of butter. The 
suspended butter is iu the form of globules 
which seem surrounded bv a little shell or 
skin supposed to consist of coagulated case- 
ine. The theory of the formation of blitter 
is very simple ; the little globules are broken 
by agitation and the butter coheres together 
in a mass ; but, as is well known, in the prac¬ 
tical carrying out of this process considerable 
difficulties arise which modify the result of 
the process. The fatty matter (butter) ob¬ 
tained by churning cream or milk is not pure 
hut still contains foreign matter, especially 
caseine, which is the ingredient that pro¬ 
duces rancidity. Pure butter from the cow 
was found by Bromeis to consist of: 
Margarine . 
Oleine . .. • — ------- ■ • °° 
Butyric, capric and caproic acids, with gly¬ 
cerine.. “ 
THE SENSES OF BEES 
IS BUTTER NUTRITIOUS I 
It is rather astonishing that any naturalist 
should doubt the existence of any of the five 
senses in bees, which they and many other 
creatures possess. Francis Huber himself 
rather doubted that bees possess the sense of 
hearing. I knew a minster of the gospel 
and student of nature who maintained that 
bees are blind. An English baronet and M. 
P., has recently delivered ft very good lecture 
to the members of a natural history society 
on the habits of bees and ants. This lecture 
has been pretty widely published, and con¬ 
tains the results of some very interesting ex¬ 
periments which he has made to test the 
truth of what some writers have advanced 
touching the senses, and capacities of bees. 
So far as his experiments go, although they 
are not conclusive (ami this he admits), bees 
do not deserve the good character which is 
flection 
so-called. Hence Likbio has denominated 
them the “plastic elements of nutrition." 
The non-nitrogenized foods—carbohydrates 
—of which butter is one, it is said are incapa¬ 
ble of transformation into blood, and are 
therefore unfitted for forming organized or 
living tissues. They are, nevertheless, es¬ 
sential to health, and LlEBlO asserts that 
their function is to support the process of 
respiration (by yielding carbon and hydro¬ 
gen, the oxidation of which is attended with 
the development of heat.) and some of them, 
he states, contribute to the formation of fat. 
These non-nitrogenized foods he calls “ele¬ 
ments of respiration.” It has been found by 
experiments on animals that starch or butter 
cannot, alone preserve the health and life of 
animals. In the report, of the Gelatine Com¬ 
mission of the French Academy of Sciences 
it is stated that a dog fed on fresh butter 
only, continued to eat it irregularly for 68 
davs. He died subsequently of inanition, 
although in a remarkable state of embon¬ 
point. During the whole experiment he. ex¬ 
haled a strong odor of butyric acid, his hair 
felt greasy and his skin was unctuous and 
covered with a fatty layer. 
It cannot be a matter of doubt, however, 
that non-nitrogenized substances are intended 
by nature to constitute part of the food of 
man and other animals, since wo find them 
in the aliments supplied by nature for ani¬ 
mals dining the first period of their exist¬ 
ence Thus in the yelk of the egg (the food 
of the embryo chick) we find fixed oil, and 
in milk we have sugar and butter, both non- 
nitrogenized principles. The office of starch, 
sugar and oil in foods is to supply the animal 
Ordinary butter, in addition to these in¬ 
gredients in variable proportions, always 
contains cheese, water and sugar of milk, to¬ 
gether amounting to from 10 to 16 per cent. 
When oleic acid absorbs oxygen from the 
air it acquires a veiy rancid smell, which is 
one of the causes of rancidity in butter, But 
the main cause is the production of butyric, 
capric, caproic and cap rylie acids. These 
acids are probably not present in any quan¬ 
tity in perfect, fresh butter, but they are 
quickly formed by the cheese left in it acting 
on the sugar of milk. Butyric acid has an 
so often given them. They lack u 
for oue another, and their devotion to their 
queen has been over-colored. They are 
minus sympathy for Buffering companions ; 
have no appreciation of color,, no powers of 
communicating ideas to each other; and 
some are more stupid than the rest. Those 
are a few of the convictions obtained by the 
lecturer from the experiments he made last 
summer. It is to be hoped that he will re- 
w 111 oh they had smelled. We have seen 
honey placed in a dark kind of cellar behind 
a room 10 yards wide ; bees Bccnted this 
honey, went iu by the door, flew across the 
room, and crawled on the floor of the dark 
cellar fill they reached the honey. The 
sense of smell in bees is so keen that they 
can detect the presence of strange bees in 
their hives, and are greatly offended at the 
breath and sweat of human beings. 
Bees have good memories as well as acute 
senses. If thuy be fed one day from a plate 
placed in n particular spot of a garden they 
will go back next, day or next week to see 
if any more can be obtained. If weather 
keeps them at homo for weeks they remem¬ 
ber the place, and go to it as soon as they 
leave their hives. 
We think that bees are very clever little 
creatures, and that they have the power of 
conveying ideas to one another. If one or 
two robber bees And access to the honey of a 
weak liivo or stock, the community to 
which the robbers belong generally gets all 
the honey in a very short time. This is al¬ 
most invariably .the case ; one hive getting 
the whole of the booty before the other 
hives are aware that booty can be had. If 
bees have no powers of conveying ideas to 
, their own community, how does it happen 
that one hive gets all and the rest none i We 
have frequently resorted (on a larger scale) 
to the same kinds of experiment that the bar¬ 
onet adopted,but tbe results and conclusions 
were quite the reverse of his. Again : When 
oue hive is robbing another there is, general¬ 
ly speaking, no resistance offered, and the 
robbers never cease till they have carried 
every particle of honey to their own hive. 
If the undefended luve be removed from its 
; stand before all its treasures are gone, and a 
■ strong hive be placed where it stood, the 
i first robbers that come now find a resistance 
i too great for them, and the whole of the 
1 fraternity of the robbing community aio 
l speedily made aware that “ their game is 
r up.” 
In preparations for swarming is there no 
-) community of ideas i no internal arrange- 
i ments made 1 Twenty or thirty thousand 
- bees are about to emigrate and leave twenty 
a thousand behind in the mother hive ; those 
3 that go have to take rations to last three 
3 days, and to be ready by twelve o’clock ! 
e Is all this mere blind instinct,) The question 
cannot be answered in the affirmative by 
i, — A. Pettigrew. 
and carry on respiration ; they do not make 
bone, muscle or flesh—the nitrogenized ali¬ 
ments alone being assimilated for this pur¬ 
pose. 
Fixed oil or fat is said to be more difficult 
of digestion and more obnoxious totliestom- 
ach than any other alimentary principle. 
Indeed, in some more or less obvious or con¬ 
cealed form, it will be found the offending 
ingredient in many of the dishes which dis¬ 
turb weak stomachs. Fried dishes of all 
kinds are abominations to the dyspeptic on 
account of the oil or fat used in their prepa¬ 
ration. Melted butter, buttered toast, but¬ 
ter cakes, rich pastry, marrow puddings and 
suet pudding are for the like reason obnox¬ 
ious to the stomach. Nature arranges the 
elements of food iu her different products iu 
better proportion for the health of animal 
bodies than is done by man. “If,” says Dr. 
Bellows in his “Philosophy of Eating,” 
“ we take our food as it is made with the 
elements mixedby Infinite Wisdom, we need 
use our judgment only in cooking it so as 
best to develop its flavor and fit it for diges¬ 
tion, and our appetites would safely direct us 
both as to the articles to be eaten and the 
amount required. But presuming, as we do, 
to know better than our Maker how to mix 
the different elements of food, we have spoil¬ 
ed some of our best articles of nourishment 
and have at the same time so perverted our 
appetites and tastes that, they are no guide, 
at least so far as relates to the use of articles 
with which we have thus interfered ; and 
the articles of diet which in this country are 
most perverted, perhaps, are wheat and milk 
and these are perverted in the same way by 
taking out and rejecting the nitrates and 
phosphates and using the carbonates only. 
The effects, especially in our cities, are mani¬ 
fest in our liability to inflammatory diseases; 
in our feebleness and weakness of muscle, for 
want of the nitrates ; in our defective, ach¬ 
ing teeth, for want of lime, &e.; in our phys¬ 
ical and mental debility, for want of the 
phosphates ; and in our ash-colored, chlorotic 
girls, for want of iron—all of which elements, 
except the carbonates, being entirely want¬ 
ing in butter and almost all in very n ice white 
flour.” 
2. Milk contains about 87 per cent, of water, 
YIELD OF MILK FROM A DUTCH HEIFER, 
Irwin Langwortiiy of South Brookfield, 
N. Y., writes to the Utica Hei'ttki that an 
association was formed recently in that vi¬ 
cinity under the name of the Dutch or “ Hol¬ 
stein Stock Breeders’ Association of the 
Unadilla Valley.” This Association purchas¬ 
ed of Mr. T. E. WRITING of Concord, Mass., 
a heifer—“ Maid of Twirk”—three years old 
and the following is given as his record of 
milk during the past season : 
“She dropped her firet calf on the 5th of 
April, 1874, and was stinted the 81st of July 
to JElswout. No record of her milk was kept 
prior to the 13th of April. Since then the 
following is a correct copy as taken from Mr. 
Whiting's milk book: 
Pounds ot Milk. Av. p u r Day. 
■w.tia-iuo 
43. 17-100 
52 . 13-100 
51.58-100 
50.12-100 
41.00 
33 . 17-100 
27.70-100 
April, 12 days. 
May, 31 days.1, 
June, 30 days.. 1. 
July, 31 days...1, 
August, 81 days..1, 
September, 31 days... 1, 
October, 31 days.1, 
November, 30 days... 
Total....,. 9 
Total average per day 
Whole number of pounds for six months 
(from May 1 to Oct. 31, inclusive,) 8,314.49- 
100. Average yield of milk per day, 44.94-100. 
An estimate was made for eight days while 
at, the New England Fair, by taking an aver¬ 
age of the day previous and the day after her 
return. Previous to her shipment from Con¬ 
cord Wednesday. Dec. 2, Mr. HJnklky milk¬ 
ed 14% pounds of milk from her and after an 
elapse of 12 hours, 16% pounds, making a 
total of 30% pounds for the day. Upon her 
being taken from the cars in Utica, having 
been en route 48 hours, she gave after an 
elapse ot 12 hours from her previous hulking, 
os weighed by Mr. Johnson, proprietor of 
the Dudley House, 13% pounds. The most 
remarkable feature of this record is its uni¬ 
form averuge yield for the entire season. 
Her feed was, for the first month, simply hay 
with three pecks of turnips daily, and after¬ 
ward pasture and two quarts of corn meal. 
After Oct. 1, four quarts of a mixture of oats, 
corn and shorts, and oue-half bushel of roots 
were fed.” 
This is a very remarkable yield and speaks 
1 favorably for the Dutch breed in the dairy. 
3, Hearing. 
that bees possessed any powers of hearing. 
He had shouted, screamed, played on the 
fiddle and made other noises, but they took 
no notice whatever.” Bees can both make 
and hear sounds. They have a language well 
understood by themselves. In times of 
activity they are seldom dumb. A single 
bee can give a note of alarm or a cry of pain 
tbat affects the whole community. With 
the point of a penknife I once caused a bee 
at the door of a hive to utter a cry of dis¬ 
tress, which instautly produced the respon¬ 
sive hush of disturbance throughout tbe 
whole swarm. In a hive of bees there may 
be heard the sounds of grief, of joy, of peace, 
of trouble, of starvation and of suffocation. 
The Bee Moth. — A writer in Philips’ 
Southern Farmer asserts that there is no 
such thing as a moth-proof hive, and that 
“ moths can only bo kept out of hives by the 
use of frames, giving them care and atten¬ 
tion as you would other stock. In examin¬ 
ing the hives hunt for moth worms, and when 
you see any, kill them. Hunt for them two 
or three times a week during the season, and 
you will soon bo free of moths. If your 
neighbors are careless you will have to watch 
your hives close every season. Constant 
watchfulness leads to success iu boo keeping. 
It is only the lazy, careless bee keeper who 
loses bees by the moth, or has bad luck.” 
