sh. The honey-bees do not
hibernate: they must have food all winter; but our native wild bees
are dormant during the cold months, and survive the winter only in the
person of the queen mother. In the spring these queens set up
housekeeping alone, and found new families.

Insects in all stages of their growth are creatures of the warmth; the
heat is the motive power that makes them go; when this fails, they are
still. The katydids rasp away in the fall as long as there is warmth
enough to keep them going; as the heat fails, they fail, till from the
emphatic "Katy did it" of August they dwindle to a hoarse, dying,
"Kate, Kate," in October. Think of the stillness that falls upon the
myriad wood-borers in the dry trees and stumps in the forest as the
chill of autumn comes on. All summer have they worked incessantly in
oak and hickory and birch and chestnut and spruce, some of them
making a sound exactly like that of the old-fashioned hand augur,
others a fine, snapping, and splintering sound; but as the cold comes
on, they go slower and slower, till they finally cease to move. A warm
day starts them again, slowly or briskly according to the degree of
heat, but in December they are finally stilled for the season. These
creatures, like the big fat grubs of the June beetles which one
sometimes finds in the ground or in decayed wood, are full of frost in
winter; cut one of the big grubs in two, and it looks like a lump of
ice cream.

Some time in October the crows begin to collect together in large
flocks and establish their winter quarters. They choose some secluded
wood for a roosting-place, and thither all the crows for many square
miles of country betake themselves at night, and thence they disperse
in all directions again in the early morning. The crow is a social
bird, a true American; no hermit or recluse is he. The winter probably
brings them together in these large colonies for purposes of
sociability and for greater warmth. By roosting close together and
quite filling a tree-top, there must result some economy of heat.

I have seen it stated in a rhetorical flight of some writer that the
new buds crowd the old leaves off. But this is not true as a rule. The
new bud is formed in the axil of the old leaf long before the leaves
are ready to fall. With only two species of our trees known to me
might the swelling bud push off the old leaf. In the sumach and
button-ball or plane-tree the new bud is formed immediately und