Birds and All Nature, Vol 7, No. 3, March 1900 / Illustrated by Color Photography

by Various

THE YOUNG NATURALIST.

BEES.—Honey is made from many substances. Not only do the flowers give up their nectar to the honey bees, but various other sources of sweets are visited by bees with profit. Clover honey is one of the most common kind, although it is all white clover honey, for the honey bee has too short a tongue to reach into the long tubes of the red clover which the bumble-bees are so fond of. Sweet-clover yields nectar which makes good honey. A dark variety of honey comes from the flowers of buckwheat, and the basswood tree which the German poets sing about, calling it by the name of linden, bears such a wealth of flowers which the honey bees like that it is swarmed day after day by so many bees that the tree seems to hum with pleasure. You can often hear the bees in a basswood tree before the tree itself is in view in the forest. Orange trees are also favorites with the honey-makers.

Broken fruits are often sucked by bees to get material for honey, and cider left in a dish where they can get at it will be visited by them. A mixture of almost any sweet liquid will attract honey bees, and they are so careless of its exact nature that they have been known to store up and make into honey substances that are not good for human beings to eat. One of the favorite forms of adulteration among those who keep bees for profit is to place glucose and water where they can get at it. They will readily fill their combs with this cheap material and seem to do very much more work in the course of a season by having placed within easy reach a mass of material that they do not have to work for.

Margaret Warner Morley, in her charming little book, "The Bee People," which has just come from the press of A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, tells how bees frequently make honey from "honey dew." This is a sweet and sticky substance that is found upon the upper side of all sorts of leaves in some localities and has caused a great deal of wonder as to where it comes from. The writer tells of the mountain children she saw in the Carolinas plucking these leaves and licking the honey-dew from them, enjoying their treat much as city children enjoy what they get at the candy store. She says the honey-dew is made by the little insects called ants' cows or aphides. The sweet liquid is thrown out from their bodies, and ants are so fond of it that some of them have been said to keep "cows" and take great care of them in order to enjoy the sweet they get from their bodies.

The aphides eat the juice of the leaves they rest on and change it into honey-dew. Resting on the under side of a leaf and feasting royally, they become so full that the honey-dew spurts from their bodies and showers the upper sides of the leaves below. Sometimes the insects are so thick upon the leaves of a magnolia tree that a shower of sweets comes down upon its lower leaves and the grass below. Trees and bushes shine with the dew, and when dust settles upon the sticky surfaces it is decidedly disagreeable.

Pliny, the first great naturalist, said he thought honey-dew was "the perspiration of the sky, the saliva of the stars, or the moisture deposited by the atmosphere while purging itself, corrupted by its admixture with the mists of the earth." Bees gather it and make it up into honey. Squirrels are fond of it, and gather the leaves one at a time, hold them up in their paws, and lick them with apparent relish.

There are so many truly wonderful things about bees which this talented writer has collected and told in simple language that her book is one of the most valuable of recent contributions to the libraries of those who enjoy the wonders of nature. Although written evidently for children it is of absorbing interest to adults, and furnishes a fund of material for conversation and observation which will make it very much in demand among teachers and parents.

The growth of the bee, the drones, the workers, and the queens, with all the details of their structure as revealed by the microscope, the making of their curious homes, their odd customs and habits, their strange enemies, and a thousand other interesting features, make the subject one of great interest, and we cannot sufficiently honor the memory of the blind naturalist, Huber, who found out more things about bees after he lost his sight than all the world ever knew of them before his time.

BAD GERMS.—In our bodies is constantly going on a great fight between germs of various sorts, if we are to believe those who know most on the subject. Microbes are all about within us, some of them apparently striving to do us good and others trying to kill us. In a few cases men of science have been able to find one kind of germ that will destroy another that is hurtful to the human system. By cultivating many sorts of germs together and separately they have come to know a great deal about what microbes like and what they cannot bear. The so-called poisons of diphtheria and typhoid fever have been recognized as having certain forms and characteristics, and a way of killing them off at wholesale has been found, and so we are not so much afraid of these diseases as we were before these discoveries were made. The germs of cholera and yellow fever are now well enough known to be controlled by sanitary measures, and the doctors are hot on the track of the bacillus of consumption. What relief the world will have when these germs are killed before they have had time to do their deadly work!