It often follows ships for a long time; day after day, some people say, but this is doubtful. No ship can outsail it and it is said to be able to fly as much as eight hundred miles in a day. Sailors often fish for it with a baited hook, but find it hard to haul in, as it often draws out the hook or breaks the line. But a bait of blubber is very attractive and in a few minutes the same bird will take the hook again. Only by catching a fish in some such way as this could a message tied to its legs by shipwrecked sailors be found.
Sailors have long had a superstition about shooting the albatross, fearing that it would bring ill luck to the ship and its crew. All who can do so would do well to read Coleridge's famous poem of the "Ancient Mariner," in which the men who "shot the albatross" brought terrible misfortune to the ship and all on board.
THE HONEY-GIVING BEE
There is only one other animal of which I shall speak as a servant or aid of man, this time an insect, the well-known hive bee, which every one of you must have seen, and like enough many of you may have felt, for this little fellow has a very "hot foot."
The bee cannot be called a tame animal. Although it lives with man and under his care, it does not know this but fancies that it is working for itself alone. And the honey which man gets from it is laid up by the busy bee for its own use. It has no notion of working for man, but is robbed by him of its sweet stores.
Among all the wild animals that are of service to man this little humming insect stands first. Nimble, active, always at work, always singing over its work, the happiest of the working class, it keeps itself busy through all the season of flowers in gathering honey from their cups and carrying it to store away in its neat cells of wax. It is a winter store of food it is laying up. By good fortune the bees are able to collect more than they need for their own use, so their keepers can take part of it and still leave the little workers enough to live on the winter through.
The bee has been working in this way for man during long ages. Go far back in time and you will find writers telling about the bees and their ways. The Greek and Roman writers tell us much about them,—some of it fancy, some of it fact,—and within later times these useful insects have been much studied and written about.
I do not propose to tell the story of the bee, for it is much too long a one to be given in this place. All I need speak of here is the service it renders to man. There are many varieties of bees but only one, the hive bee, is of interest to us in this story, for it is the only one that works for us.
What we do for the bee is to supply it a home to live in, a cage or hive in which it may dwell, take care of its young, and lay up a store of its sweet food. How all this is done is very interesting. There is nothing in nature more neatly built than the waxen comb of the bee, and no prettier dish for our tables than a comb full of the golden honey. And there is nothing which most of us like better to eat. So it is the comb of the bee that I shall speak of here, rather than the bee itself.