November 4. 
THE COTTAGE GAEDENEE. 
89| 
church ; hut he left his cows that flay for ever, ami his place 
knew him no more! He recovered, indeed, of the fever, 
and another child sickened and died while Willy was getting 
well; hut just as he began to creep again out-of-doors, and 
gain strength, liis body began to swell, and his mother igno¬ 
rantly and obstinately disregarded the doctor’s directions, 
until too late to save her child ; and 2 ’oor little Willy is now- 
laid beside the sister and Ijrothers who have gone before 
him. The poor mother is almost stunned with the force of 
these repeated visitations ; four times within the month has 
the bell tolled for her; four times has death entered her 
dwelling; four times has the voice of the Lord sounded in 
her ears. Of the five children that lived at home, the baby 
in arms only is left; and the stillness—the solemn, terrible 
silence of that once noisy cottage—must agonise the hearts 
of the bereaved iiarents ; it must cry louder than any earthly 
I warning, “ Hear the rod, and who hath a^fpointed it.” 
1 Little can be said to .Tones and his wife as yet. The 
house is iirfeoted, and unsafe; and it needs more than a 
hasty passing moment to say all that can bo said on such 
an occasion. But if this heavy chastening does not touch 
and teach the heart; if they “ pull away the shoulder,” and 
“ w ill none of God's reproof,” what can man’s feeble word 
do for them ? This is no light matter, easy to be mis- 
understood ; this is no trifling circumstance, that seems to 
need man’s hand to drive it home: it is a loud and terrible 
call from God’s own mouth—a sharp and terrible blow from 
God’s owm hand—can tliey refuse to hear and understand it? 
“Whether they will hear, or whether Ihey will forbear,” 
let my cottage readers, yea, readers of all degrees, harken. 
This is a call; a cry to vs. What are we doing on the 
Sabbath? We may not be minding our children, or clean¬ 
ing oiu’ houses, or secretly washing our clothes ; hut are we 
keeping it holy ! Are we “ doing our owm ways,” “ finding 
our own ideasure,” “ speaking our own words,” on that holy 
day ? Are we going to church in the morning, and doing 
j our owoi business the rest of the day, if we do go to church 
I at all ? Are we not “Jones’s” in our different \vays and 
different siiheres ? The letter written; the worldly book, 
the newspaper, read ; the journey or the excursion taken ; 
the light, thoughtless, worldly conversation indulged in; 
the visit paid or received, are “ our own w-ays,” “ pleasimcs,” 
and “ words,” quite as much as cleaning and washing our 
clothes and houses. W'ho among us are altogether guiltless 
in this matter? WTio among us remember that the Sabbath 
is declared by the Lord to be “ a sign between me and you, 
throughout your generations : that ye may know that I am 
the Lord that doth sanctify you.” Wlio among us hallows 
it as it ought to be hallowed? Who among us “remembers” 
w'liat the "Word of the Lord hath spoken. 
Let us all take home to our hearts the affliction that has 
fallen upon William and Ann Jones, the chastening they 
have received, and lay our hands upon our mouths. The 
rod may fall next, if it has not already done so, upon oiu’- 
selves. Let us walk so that our God may visit us m mercy, 
and not in judgment; for self-condemnation sharpiens and 
poisons the arrow that enters the heart. Let us remember 
the w'ords of Him, our Eedeemer, who came to seek and 
save that which was lost; “ Those eighteen upon whom the 
tower of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye they w'ere 
sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem ? I tell you 
nay ; but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish,” 
WILD BEES. 
Tg 11, W. Newman, Esq. 
I {Continuedfrom page 5‘i.) 
j APIS MtlSCORUM, OR MOSS CARDER. 
I The queen mother of this species is not so largo as that 
of the others I have described, and she is the latest of the 
I Bombinatrices in appearing in the sjjring. Her colour is 
pale yellow, very nearly the same as the moss in which she 
makes her nest, the body is hairy, the proboscis long, legs 
black; the abdomen of the male is longer than that of the 
female. The worker becomes cinereous as it gets older. 
Tins sirecies is very easily taken, as they make their nest on 
the surface of the moss, and in most cases removed from 
the tread of cattle, in some quiet bank, or retired spot with a 
southern aspect. One single queen commences a colony,! 
which, in general, is few in number, although in favourable! 
situations in Scotland, where the wild flowers of their seekingi 
abound, I have found two hundred in number, and fromi 
that down to twenty, or even ten. This is a good sp)ecies'' 
for watching the operations of the queen bee. I have easily i 
taken many of their nests, the same way as the last de- j 
scribed. The more cultivated and rich the counLy, the 1 
fewer bees of this species are found, and they vary in ! 
colour. In Scotland they are of a much darker yellow, and 
are called the foggg-hee, from moss being called fog, in that 
part of the kingdom. 
When shooting on the IMoors, in August, I have found the ^ 
nest of this species verj- weak in numbers ; sometimes only } 
three or four workers besides the queen ; one wonders how 
they exist in such a miserable locality; however, there they 
may be seen, booming along, and in a very calm day their 
hum is the only sound heard except the whirr of the Moor¬ 
cock. When a boy, I had many colonies of these insect.s in 
my garden, and have w-atcbed their habits, which I can 
inform my readers are precisely the same as those already 
described, at least as to the males adopting a voluntary 
banishment and never rctiu-ning to their nest. Excepting 
to an habitual obseiwer, this is the most difficult species to 
watch, as the difference in colour and aiipearance is less than 
in any others between the workers and drones; the antenna! 
of the latter are lai’ge, and a little curved, like a cow’s-horn. 
In an old orchard overgrown with moss, in Northampton¬ 
shire, I fouird at least twenty of their nests in the space of 
twenty yards square ; no cattle had been in it, as it adjoined 
a kitchen garden, nor had there been any carts or waggons 
there. I had some difficulty myself to walk without treading 
on their nests, which may be known by being a little raiseil 
above the surface, and the moss a lighter colour. These 
bees are fond of the wildest of all wild flow-ers ; they fly very 
near the earth, but have a verj- straight flight; they may be 
seen on the wild flowers in the deepest vallies and woods, 
as well as on the highest hills, and they are by far the 
hardiest and strongest of all their congeners. I have seen 
them, in moat stormy weather, winging their way from flower 
to flower, at a time when no other hee could be seen to 
brave the wind and rain. 
The male of this species is the latest of all in appearance, 
at least in our climate, seldom appearing before the end of 
Augtist or beginning of September, and may be distin¬ 
guished by his low flight along hedgerows, and his stopping 
frequently as if intending to go into the ground; this he will 
continue for a mile together, and, if watched, he wall be seen 
to retm-n to the same places more than ten times in an houi'! 
There are two or three varieties of the Apis Museomm, one 
of which the workers ai'e good sized bees, with scarcely any 
small ones in the nest; these inhabit the West of England. 
I found that it does not answer the end to examine the nest 
of the Carders often. I fomid a strong nest in North ampton- 
i shire, a few years since, and examined it repeatedly by 
brealdng the moss; at last, a young friend of mine, wishing 
to have it in his garden, we went one night to take it, and 
discovered about one thousand ants in possession of the 
combs, and all the bees gone. The ants had got through 
the moss where it was broken and unguarded, and had 
overpowered the bees. 
Should any of ray readers wish to make experiments on 
any species of these insects, they should choose the end of 
July or beginning of August, or, if a dry, hot summer, a fort¬ 
night earlier. By far the most interesting of the .species I 
have described ai-e the Apis Lucorum and Lapidariw. The 
males of each of these are beautiful in their colours, and 
easily distinguished from the workers. The love of then' 
offspring is strongly developed in all these insects. AVhen 
first I took their nests, the only combs I robbed them of 
were those containing honey, being, like a time boy, fond of 
sweets; the bees that I brought with these combs generally 
emptied the cells and deserted them. I afterwards found 
that whenever I took the combs containing young brood in 
embryo, this was never the case. 
{To be continued.) 
