-the fact, however, being that their owners emigrated and took
them with them. But they have been positively known to track heath a
distance of four miles, and that across water, through an atmosphere in
which the faint scent of the heath must have mingled with all the
powerful salt odor of the sea. Strong little wings they must be, too, to
travel these distances, and yet perform all the other labor allotted
them; for every day, while some with their burdens are entering the
black hive, and some are darting out again into the glaring sunlight
full of business and on new errands, others may always be distinguished
stationed by the door and fanning their bits of wings backward and
forward in ventilation of the hive. Although disputatious to the last,
Mr. Huish insists that this motion is nothing but the expression of
intense satisfaction and joy. Either way, it would seem as if an
answering rest must be required in order to repair such wear and tear;
and on this point an old Spanish writer sets it down that bees sleep
during every night and on all fast-days in addition, and a corroborating
investigator remarks that he has seen them withdraw into the empty
cells, and, composing themselves, their heads towards the bottom, enjoy
the deepest slumber, the body gently heaving with the breath, and every
little limb relaxed,--to which another person replies, that this is an
outrageous statement, for it is a decided fact that sleep is as much a
stranger to the eye of a bee as it is to the eye of a herring. Yet in
the German countries much of the labor of flight is after all spared
them, their owners collecting them into caravans, conducting them
gypsy-wise, encamping here and encamping there, through whatever
districts linger latest in bloom. They build bee-barges, too, in France,
capacious enough for a hundred hives, and drift them down the rivers, so
that the bees shall follow the summer as it flits southward. And in
Lower Egypt, where the blossoming continues much longer than in the
upper regions, Niebuhr saw an assemblage of four thousand hives upon the
Nile; anchoring at places of plentiest pasturage: the bees thus float
from one end of the land to the other before they return and enrich
their proprietors with the honey they have harvested from the
orange-flowers and jasmines of the Said and all the wealthy banks of the
mighty river. The hunter in America takes advantage of this clear sight
and of this strength of wing when, he