one partly concealed under a leaf.
Its baskets were full of pollen, and it did not move. On lifting up the
leaf I discovered that a hairy spider was ambushed there and had the bee
by the throat. The vampire was evidently afraid of the bee's sting, and
was holding it by the throat till quite sure of its death. Virgil speaks
of the painted lizard, perhaps a species of salamander, as an enemy
of the honey-bee. We have no lizard that destroys the bee; but our
tree-toad, ambushed among the apple and cherry blossoms, snaps them up
wholesale. Quick as lightning that subtle but clammy tongue darts forth,
and the unsuspecting bee is gone. Virgil also accuses the titmouse
and the woodpecker of preying upon the bees, and our kingbird has been
charged with the like crime, but the latter devours only the drones. The
workers are either too small and quick for it, or else it dreads their
sting.

Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's knowledge of the
honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth Georgic. If
he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is hard to
see how he could have believed that the bee in its flight abroad carried
a gravel stone for ballast:--

"And as when empty barks on billows float,
With Sandy ballast sailors trim the boat;
So bees bear gravel stones, whose poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight;"

or that when two colonies made war upon each other they issued forth
from their hives led by their kings and fought in the air, strewing the
ground with the dead and dying:--

"Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain,
Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of acorns rain."

It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting. If he had, we should
have had a fifth Georgic. Yet he seems to have known that bees sometimes
escaped to the woods:--

"Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found
In chambers of their own beneath the ground:
Their vaulted roofs are hung in pumices,
And in the rotten trunks of hollow trees."

Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are like their brothers
in hive. The only difference is that wild honey is flavored with your
adventure, which makes it a little more delectable than the domestic
article.

THE PASTORAL BEES

The honey-bee goes forth from the hive in spring like the dove from
Noah's ark, and it is not till after many days that she brings back the
olive l