Waiting a little longer, we found that the birds were on the watch for these flies, and it was these they were catching instead of the bees at that particular time.
A certain naturalist, who has spent a good deal of time trying to find out if the bee-birds do really kill bees, has told us a little secret, which is very interesting and may lead some other people to investigate the matter. He says that he has never found a worker-bee in the stomach of a bee-bird, though he has examined a great many of them. He has found only drones, which the worker bees are very glad to get rid of and often kill, because they are lazy and eat honey without gathering any for winter.
Perhaps one reason why the bee-bird prefers the drone to the worker is because the drones have no stings.
By all this you see that it pays us to take some trouble to find out all the good there is about anybody.
However, it cannot be denied that the king-birds do eat bees, when they can find nothing they like better. We have often wondered what they do with so many stings, and why they are not poisoned by them. We have not examined a king-bird's throat to find out this secret, but a friend of ours did look at the throat of a toad which persisted in eating his bees on warm summer evenings. This man found a good many stings on the side of the toad's throat, which had caught there when he swallowed the bees. Stings are probably not poisonous to toads and bee-birds.
Loggerhead Shrike.
Hardly anybody speaks a good word for the butcher-bird or shrike.[9] Yet this bird is not half so bad as most people think he is. It is true that he has been caught a few times in doing very naughty things, such as making a dinner on a small chicken, or on birds weaker than himself.
[9] Lanius ludovicianus.
But his most common food consists of insects, especially Jerusalem crickets. This great yellow cricket is an inch or two inches long, and he looks as bad as he is reported to be, for he wears a suit of clothes with brown and yellow stripes, running around, instead of up and down in the usual way for stripes. This makes one think of a convict or a convict's suit of clothes.