Marvels of the Universe 1027 
diabolical moments did he conceive a weapon like the sting of a bee. It is a blade so slender that, 
beside it, the finest needle ever made is but a roughly-welded bar. And yet not one blade, but three 
together: not only that, but each blade furnished with an edge of jagged barbs, and drenched 
with a venom doubly compounded. Nor these alone ; for the three keen-toothed, poisoned darts 
are so contrived that, after the initial common thrust is made by the wielder, they take to them- 
selves an individual energy ; and go on thrusting, each in turn, deeper and deeper, though the 
whole contrivance may have been torn from its possessor’s body, and she herself may be dead before 
the death-stroke she launched has worked her will. 
THE BRITISH TRAP-DOOR SPIDER 
BY FRED ENOCK, F.L.S. 
Ix some of the oldest books on Natural History we find fairly good woodcuts of the nests of the 
Trap-door Spider, and by the tourists to the South of France these “funny little things” are brought 
home as souvenirs of their visit; but it is an extraordinary fact that though these nests have 
been known to naturalists and tourists for over a century, no one has yet told how the Spider 
makes and fixes its wonderful trap-door. Some years ago the late Sir Sydney Saunders pre- 
sented to me a nest of the Ionian species, together with the living occupant, which did not 
long survive. The nest was four inches deep by an inch in diameter, fitted at the top with a 
BSS iss 
Photo by] [7'. Edwardes. 
AN OLD-FASHIONED BEE GARDEN. 
The straw skeps shown in the photograph are probably almost identical with those used by bee-masters for a thousand 
years back. With hives of this pattern it is impossible to learn anything of bee-life. Not until the movable-comb hive was 
invented in the middle of the last century was the wonderful communal life of the honey-bee revealed to investigators. 
