o say that the queen is followed on her rounds by a royal
guard, who wait on her with obsequious reverence, although it seems to
be a pretty custom enough, the actual custom may be found a far prettier
one: for the queen attends to her affairs, as others are assured, quite
unaccompanied; only as workers at all times cover the comb, when she
passes from group to group, each bee for a moment leaves labor, bestows
a caress upon its mother, offers her honey, refreshes her, sees her
pass to the next group, which hastens to do the same, while the first
returns to the business of the moment. The elder Huber taxes the
credulity, however, hardly more than his son does, in presenting a
drawing of humble-bees hindering a toppling comb from falling by taking
acrobatic postures, standing on their heads and supporting it with their
hind legs till relieved, converting themselves, in fact, into a kind of
flying-buttresses. Indeed, the trouble with all these things is, that
naturalists persist in endowing the little creatures with human
passions; and having once given the rein to imagination, it runs away
with them. Now and then they find themselves in a quagmire; but
sometimes the result is simply amusing, as in old Butler's most graphic
and entertaining description of the pillage of a weak hive by its rich
and powerful neighbor, in the "Feminine Monarchie." Yet these stories
have been told ever since the Flood. Aristotle assures us, that, when a
bee has a headwind to encounter, he ballasts himself with a little
pebble between his feet; and the Abbe della Rocca, who made observations
on the bees of the Grecian Archipelago, had the pleasure of witnessing
the circumstance in person,--which would cause one to conjecture that
the Greek bees, ever since they made honey on Plato's lip, have had
habits peculiar to themselves, were it not that the little solitary
mason-bee comes to the rescue,--the mason-bee, that, loaded with gravel
and material for her nest, both Aristotle and the Abbe della Rocca
undoubtedly saw. It is Virgil, however, on whom, in practical matters,
apiarists have not yet improved, who has told the most amazing stories
about bees, certifying that the body of their people may be bred from
decay, and particularizing the blossom on which the king of the bees is
born; but Virgil lived, it is to be recollected, nearly two thousand
years ago, and two hundred have not yet passed since Redi, sometimes
called the father of experimenta