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Ah! where were once her golden eyes,
Her glitting wings of purple pride?
Concealed beneath a rude disguise!
A shapeless mass to earth allied.

Like thee, the hapless reptile lived,
Like thee she toiled, like thee she spun;
Like thine, her closing hour arrived,
Her labour ceased, her web was done.
And shalt thou, numbered with the dead,
No happier state of being know?
And shall no future morrow shed
On thee a beam of brighter glow?
Is this the bound of Pow'r divine,
To animate an insect frame?
Or shall not He who moulded thine
Wake, at his will, the vital flame?

Go, mortal! in thy reptile state,
Enough to know to thee is given;
Go, and the joyful truth relate,

Frail child of Earth, high heir of Heav'n.

No. XXXVIII.

ON THE WONDERFUL OPERATIONS OF BEES.

Ac veluti in pratis, ubi apes in æstate serena
Floribus insidunt variis, et candida circum
Lilia funduntur-

To their delicious task the 'fervent bees,

VIRGIL.

In swarming millions tend: around, athwart,
Through the soft air, the busy nations fly,
Cling to the bud, and with inserted tube,
Suck its pure essence, its etherial soul;
And oft, with bolder wing, they soaring dare
The purple heath, or where the wild thyme grows,
And yellow load them with the luscious spoil.

THOMSON.

THE wisdom of the Bees, the perfection and harmony of their government, their persevering in

dustry, and wonderful economy, have been celebrated by the natural historians of every age. Nor has this subject been forgotten by the poets. These industrious insects, have furnished them with similes from the remotest times. The great father of poetry compares a crowded host of Greeks to a swarm of bees'. The Tyrians, employed in building a city, are compared by Virgil, to bees performing their wonderful operations. My motto, from the same author, is part of a simile, in which he compares the ghosts, flitting near the river Lethe, to bees roving in the meads from flower to flower3. But Milton has carried the similitude farther than any of his great masters; for he introduces the consultation of the fallen angels in Pandemonium, by a description of bees expatiating and conferring their state affairs 4. Horace, in the fine ode, in which he styles Pindar the Theban Swan, modestly compares himself to a bee, roving with feeble wing and idle murmurs, and with unceasing labour, culling from each bloom his flowery spoils. Lucretius too, while employed in collecting and elucidating the doctrines and lessons of his master Epicurus, compares himself to the bee, extracting honey from the most fragrant flowers. Shak

speare exalts the subject to far greater consequence; for he describes the busy nation as a monarchy:

So work the honey bees;

Creatures, that by a rule in nature teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.

They have a king, and officers of sort;

Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trades abroad;

Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,

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Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds,
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent royal of their emperor,
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys

The singing mason building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o'er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone1.

Pope also has the following lines:

Learn each small people's genius, policies,
The ant's republic, and the realm of bees;
How those in common all their wealth bestow,
And anarchy without confusion know;
And these for ever, though a monarch reign,
Their separate cells and properties maintain.
Mark what unvaried laws preserve each state,
Laws wise as Nature, and as fixt as Fate 2.

And Churchill, after the following beautiful and picturesque description, introduces a sovereign, drawing from it, in a soliloquy, the most natural reflections on the momentous duties of his station:

Strength in her limbs, and on her wing dispatch,
The bee goes forth; from herb to herb she flies,
From flow'r to flow'r, and loads her lab'ring thighs
With treasured sweets; robbing those flowers, which left
Find not themselves made poorer by the theft,
Their scents as lively, and their looks as fair,
As if the pillager had not been there.

Ne'er doth she flit on Pleasure's silken wing;
Ne'er doth she, loit'ring, let the bloom of Spring
Unrifled pass, and on the downy breast
Of some fair flow'r indulge untimely rest.
Ne'er doth she, drinking deep of those rich dews
Which Chymist Night prepared, that faith abuse
Due to the hive, and, selfish in her toils,
To her own private use convert the spoils.
Love of the stock first called her forth to roam,
And to the stock she brings her honey home 3.

1 King Henry V. Act. i.

2 Essay on Man, iii.

3 Gotham, book iii.

This golden daughter of the Spring,

From mead to mead, in wanton labour roves,
And loads its little thigh, or gilds its wing
With all the essence of the flushing groves:
Extracts the aromatic soul of flowers,

And, humming in delight, its waxen bowers

Fills with the luscious spoils, and lives ambrosial hours.

But more quotations are superfluous to the poetical part of my subject, therefore, I shall only add, what every classical reader will recollect, that Virgil has devoted the fourth book of his Georgics entirely to the subject of bees; a subject, which he paints con amore, in all the matchless harmony of song.'

The skill and dexterity of the honey-bees, dis played in the construction of their combs or nests, are truly wonderful. They are composed of cells regularly applied to each other's sides. These cells are uniform hexagons or six-sided figures. In a bee-hive, every part is arranged with such symmetry, and so finely finished, that, if limited to the same materials, the most expert workman would find himself unqualified to construct a similar habitation, or rather a similar city.

In the formation of their combs, bees seem to resolve a problem which would not be a little puzzling to some geometers; namely, a quantity of wax being given, to make of it equal and similar cells of a determined capacity, but of the largest size in proportion to the quantity of matter employed, and disposed in such a manner as to occupy in the hive the least possible space. Every part of this problem is completely executed by the bees. By applying hexagonal cells to each other's sides, no void spaces are left between them; and, though the same end might be accomplished by other figures, yet they would ne-cessarily require a greater quantity of wax.

Be

sides, hexagonal cells are better fitted to receive the cylindrical bodies of these insects. A comb consists of two rows of cells applied to each other's ends. This arrangement both saves room in the hive, and gives a double entry into the cells of which the comb is composed. As a further saving of wax, and preventing of void spaces, the bases of the cells in one row of a comb serve for bases to the opposite row. In a word, the more minutely the construction of these cells is examined, the more will the admiration of the observer be excited. The walls of the cells are so extremely thin, that their mouths would be in danger of suffering by the frequent entering and issuing of the bees. To prevent this disaster, they make a kind of ring round the margin of each cell, and this ring is three or four times thicker than the walls.

It is difficult to perceive, even with the assist ance of glass-hives, the manner in which bees operate when constructing their cells. They are so eager to afford mutual assistance, and, for this purpose, so many of them crowd together, and are perpetually succeeding each other, that their individual operations can seldom be distinctly observed. It has however, been plainly discovered, that their two teeth are the only instruments they employ in modelling and polishing the wax. With a lit tle patience and attention, we perceive cells just begun. We likewise remark the quickness with which a bee moves its teeth against a small portion of the cell. This portion the animal, by repeated strokes on each side, smooths, renders compact, and reduces to a proper thinness of consistence, While some of the hive are lengthening their hexa gonal tubes, others are laying the foundations of new ones. When a bee puts its head a little way into a cell, we easily perceive it scraping the walls with the points of its teeth, in order to detach such

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