Spiders annoy the bees much. The bees get entangled in their webs, and are not able to extricate themselves. Here cleanliness is the best protection; therefore care should be had to sweep the webs away from the hive and its avenues as fast as they appear.
Birds eat a prodigious quantity of bees, especially in spring, when the trees are in blossom. Whatever people may say to the contrary, I have reason to think that the swallows, which are perpetually cruising about in the air, like so many corsairs, destroy a great number, to regale themselves, and to feed their young: this was the opinion of Virgil[5].
"Absint ... meropesque, aliæque volucres,
Et manibus Progne pectus signata cruentis.
Omnia nam late vastant, ipsasque volantes
Ore ferunt, dulcem nidis immitibus escam."
Georg. iv.
Moths destroy whole colonies: birds do not entirely destroy, but they diminish the population; the queens, especially, become an easy prey to them, their flight being heavy, from the great length of their bodies and shortness of their wings; and the queen, being the very soul of the hive, when she dies the whole will infallibly perish, if there is not some of the proper brood ready to fill her place; and, even in the latter case, the population is retarded in the fine weather, and the hive becomes languid. As this happened to me several times, I imputed it to the loss of my queens.
The poultry, too, that roam about near the water where the bees go to quench their thirst, gobble up a great many of them, making a constant war on them, as deadly as that carried on by the birds. I have even seen a tame magpie place herself between two hives, peck right and left, and snap up hundreds of bees to her breakfast. She was caught in the act, condemned to death, and executed in the same instant.