nly grown as an ornament on account of its
great profusion of scarlet blossoms continuing until frost, is a very
productive variety; pods very large and very succulent, making an
excellent string-bean; a rich variety when dry, but objectionable on
account of their dark color. The Red and the White Cranberries, Dutch
Caseknife, and many other varieties, have good qualities, but are
inferior to those mentioned above. Beans may be forwarded in hotbeds, by
planting on sods six inches square, put bottom-up on the hotbed, and
covered with fine mould; plant four beans on each sod; when frost is
gone, remove the sod in the hill beside the pole, previously set, leave
only two pole-beans to grow in a hill; they will always produce more
than a greater number. A shrub six feet high, with the branches on, is
better than a pole for any running bean; nearly twice as many will grow
on a bush as on a pole. Use a crowbar for setting poles, or drive a
stake down first, and set poles very deep, or they will blow down and
destroy the beans.

BEES AND BEEHIVES.

The study of the honey-bee has been pursued with interest from remote
ages. A work on bees, by De Montfort, published at Antwerp in 1649,
estimates the number of treatises on this subject, before his time, at
between five and six hundred. As that was two hundred and eight years
ago, the number has probably increased to two thousand or more. We have
some knowledge of the character of these early works, as far back as
Democritus, four hundred and sixty years before the Christian era. The
great men of antiquity gave particular attention to study and writing on
the honey-bee.--Among them we notice Aristotle, Plato, Columella, Pliny,
and Virgil. At a later period, we have Huber, Swammerdam, Warder,
Wildman, _&c._ In our own day, we have Huish, Miner, Quinby, Weeks,
Richardson, Langstroth, and a host of others. For the first two thousand
years from the date of these works, the bee was treated mainly as a
curious insect, rather than as a source of profit and luxury to man. And
although Palestine was eulogized as a land flowing with milk and honey,
before the Hebrews took possession of it, yet the science of
_bee-culture_ was wholly unknown.

In the earliest attention to bees, they were supposed to originate in
the concentrated aroma of the sweetest and most beautiful flowers.
Virgil, and others of his time, supposed them to come from the carcasses
of dead animals. But the remarkable ex