WHY THE BEES GET OUT OF BREATH
Bees can't climb to such heights because the air is very thin, and, therefore, harder to fly in. Remember their little bodies are heavy and their wings are small. They get out of breath, like a fat man with short legs working his way up Pike's Peak. The butterflies, on the other hand, have small bodies and large wings, and so have the meadows of the higher Alps all to themselves. That the flowers here look so brilliant is partly due to the thinness and clearness of the air and partly to the disposition of the butterflies. A bee is all business, because she has so many mouths to feed at home, and is laying up honey for the days of the long winter. Mr. and Mrs. Butterfly, on the other hand, are gay and carefree society people.
"We have no family waiting to be fed, so why worry?" This is the butterfly philosophy. Only a sip of nectar now and then for their personal wants; for the rest of the day the merry air dance, here, there, everywhere! They flit long distances without lighting. To attract the bee's attention a blossom need be neither large nor bright, as the bee goes straight from flower to flower, wasting no time in aimless flights. But to catch the eye of the butterfly the flowers must be brilliantly colored and grow in large masses. So up in the butterfly zone only brilliant flowers, and those having the habit of growing in groups produce seed and have descendants. Those that dress plainly and are not fond of company die out.
HOW THE SOLDANELLA SISTERS GOT TO THE MAY-PARTY THROUGH THE SNOW
Now didn't it turn out just as I said; that the butterflies themselves help brighten the flowers that grow among these ice fields? I have something else quite as curious to tell you: Both the Alpine butterflies and the flowers were left over from the Ice Age. Not in the same sense that we pebbles were, for we are the identical little passengers who rode in on the ice trains, and the life of a butterfly, as every one knows, is very short. So is that of a flower. Yet suppose you found that the only other butterflies and flowers like these are found, not among the flowers and butterflies in the lands lower down in the Alps but up toward the Arctic Zone, in Finland and Lapland; in the snow regions of mountains in the temperate zone all over the world? It would look very much as if these flowers and butterflies, or their ancestors, had been left behind there some time or other, wouldn't it? This is what the men of science think, and they reason about it in this way:
HOW THE BUTTERFLIES MISSED THE TRAIN
As the glaciers spread downward from the Far North in the Ice Age they brought all their home things with them—climate, plants, insects, animals. Plant and animal life was driven step by step before the advancing ice. Then, as the ice melted, flowers, butterflies, and all followed their natural climate back. But those that lingered too long in the meadows around the mountain tops could not cross the hot summer plains that now lay between them and the retiring ice sheet; for plants and animals that are used to cold can't stand the heat any more than those from the tropics can stand the cold. So only the flowers and butterflies remained in the temperate zone that found their natural climate among the mountain peaks and stayed there.
Near the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in New Hampshire, is a colony of the descendants of these butterfly pilgrims from the north who never leave their high and wind swept meadows. There are no such butterflies in the hills and plains below, but go into Labrador and you will see plenty of them.
LEFT-OVER PIECES OF THE ICE AGE