The situation of our hive cannot always be in such a flowery land; and the beekeeper will do well to study the different flora and trees in the immediate neighbourhood of his hive, and endeavour to supply any deficiencies of pollen-bearing plants, as well as to give a gentle hint to the inhabitants of his hives of any honey-bearing plant from which he especially wants them to gather. Of course, in wild heather districts, there is no need to resort to planting or sowing for the bees; they will in such places always take care of themselves. In Somersetshire, bees find honey from the many miles of apple-orchard stretching away to the mild county of Devon; and farmers well know that a good bee season, with a warm and early spring, means a plentiful show of fruit in the autumn for cider. In and around Middlesex, there are market and fruit gardens; and in Hertfordshire, grazing and clover lands, besides hedges lined with limes and hawthorn, and later on, honeysuckle.
It is always a good plan to send late swarms of the hive into heather-bearing counties; for the bees being young, and having every inducement to work for the approaching winter, will store better than hives which have been ‘swarmed’ and deprived of honey, the colonies of which are worn or fatigued with the long-continued gathering of a summer in more southern counties. It must likewise be remembered that bees cannot gather, or rather will not do so, late in the autumn, when the cold prevents them sealing over with wax the top of the cell.
And now, a last word as to the preference of our bees for certain flowers over others, which we would imagine, with our limited powers of the sense of smell and taste, would be preferred by these insects, and for which we have the greater amount of regard. I have seen, upon the approach of a bee to any flower, that it flies around the calyx almost always before alighting upon the flower itself. This is a cursory examination; and with its antennæ outstretched and quivering, it is evidently scenting the honey contained within. Should this prove a fruitful flower and of the flavour required, the bee settles on the centre of the stamen, and clutching it with its four front-legs, steadies itself with its longer outstretched two hindermost ones, and withdraws the nectar by its proboscis, the rings of the body assuming a vibratory motion the while. The bee’s proboscis is a most important instrument. It is composed of forty cartilaginous rings, each of which is fringed with minute hairs, having also a small tuft of hair at its extremity, where it is somewhat serrated. Its movement is like the trunk of an elephant, and is susceptible of extension and contraction, bending and twisting in all directions. Thus, by rolling it about, it searches out the calyx, pistil, and stamen of every flower, and deposits its nectar upon the tongue, whence it passes into the gullet at the base. The gullet or first stomach is the honey-bag. No digestion takes place here. In shape, it is like an oil-flask, and when full, contains about one grain. It is susceptible of contraction, and is so arranged as to enable the insect to disgorge its contents into the cells of the hive. A short passage leads to the ventricle or true stomach, which is somewhat larger. This receives the food from the honey-bag, for the nourishment of the bee and the secretion of wax. Dzierzon says that the honey which a bee can take into her stomach will enable her to subsist for a week under some circumstances, while under others she will die of hunger within twenty-four hours. This opinion of Dzierzon settles my conviction, that in the selection of the kind of food which will enable the bee to live longest, the true guide is to be found in the flowers for which it has the strongest preference.
BOOK GOSSIP.
The Norman Conquest is one of the great outstanding and predominating facts in English history. It occasioned a sudden break in the life of the English people, and its influence is felt in their character and institutions even to the present day. A hundred and fifty years before that event, the long black ships of the Norse pirates entered the wide mouths of the Seine and the Loire, and their crews, the rudest of the rough barbarians of Denmark and Norway, sacked the towns and pillaged the churches of the country which was afterwards to be called by their name. They had no science, no arts, no culture. Their physical strength was their glory; and their weapons of war, their defence at home, served also as their passport into the lands of the stranger whom they plundered and slew. But they had a remarkable power of adaptation. However foreign to them the environment into which their hardy courage had brought them, they did not long remain untouched by it. Without losing their own native hardihood and fearlessness, they quickly absorbed into them the spirit of the peoples and institutions among which they had taken root; and before a century had passed over their heads in France, they had already become one of the great political forces of Europe. It was this people, brave, warlike, and with strong practical sagacity, who landed on the English shores in 1066, and shattered the Saxon arms on the slopes of Senlac. The battle at ‘the hoar apple tree,’ where Harold lay dead with the Norman arrow deep in his brain, marks the beginning of a new epoch in England.
The history of that great event, with its antecedents and consequents, has rarely been better told than it is by Mr Wm. Hunt, in the new volume of the ‘Early Britain Series,’ entitled The Norman Conquest (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge). As compared with the work of Freeman, this is in bulk but a small book; yet it contains within it all that thousands of readers would desire to know of the history of the Conquest. The author is extremely well-informed on his subject, and his scholarly little book gives evidence not only of original research but of much original thought. The pictures he draws for us of the England that preceded the Conquest, and of the England that followed it, are sketched with a fullness and beauty of detail which amply exhibit the capacity and preparedness of the author for the task which he undertook, and which he has executed so well. His extensive reading has enabled him to take advantage of the results obtained by all the best and more recent investigators in this section of European history; and the Northmen both before and after their descent on France, as well as the Saxon tribes and Danish hordes that scoured our coasts centuries before, are portrayed with a quick and living touch. Still more interesting is the story of the Normans after their taking possession of England; and the strange manner in which the Saxon head eventually conquered the Norman hand—the Saxon language and institutions arising in more than their original vitality and force out of the ashes, as it were, of a temporary death—is here narrated with admirable clearness and coherency. The book is one of the best of the very valuable series to which it belongs.
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The same publishing house issues another learned little volume on Anglo-Saxon Literature, by Mr John Earle, Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford. It belongs to the series bearing upon ‘The Dawn of European Literature,’ and is rich with the results of the best modern scholarship on the early history and growth of our language. The time when Latin and Greek formed the chief essentials of learning is fast receding into the past, and these languages are having a place assigned them more consistent with the necessities of the modern world, which is not tolerant of the acquisition of a kind of knowledge that in great part is archaic and useless. Under the influence of this change, our own language is rising into an importance which it could never attain so long as it was regarded simply as a vulgar tongue, and the historical study of English is becoming one of the most popular as well as one of the most useful pursuits of our philologists. The great English Dictionary of the Philological Society is only one evidence of this; for individual scholars, during the last twenty years, have done not a little to lay bare to us the inner structure of our language, and the changes and modifications to which it has been subjected in the course of its long descent.
In the little work under review, Mr Earle states that Anglo-Saxon literature is the oldest of the vernacular literatures of modern Europe. The materials of this early literature are found chiefly in written books and documents; but they are found also in such subsidiary sources as inscriptions on churches and church towers, sun-dials, crosses, and even on jewellery. One of the most remarkable in this last category is what is known as the Alfred Jewel. It was discovered in Newton Park, near Athelney, in 1693, and in 1718 had found its way to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where it still is. It consists of an enamelled figure enshrined in a golden frame, with a golden back to it, and with a thick piece of rock-crystal in front, to serve as a glass to the picture. Around the sloping rim the following legend is wrought in the fabric: Ælfred mec heht gewyrcean (‘Alfred me commanded to make’). ‘The language of the legend,’ says the author, ‘agrees perfectly with the age of King Alfred, and it seems to be the unhesitating opinion of all those who have investigated the subject that it was a personal ornament of the great West-Saxon king.’ Mr Earle traces the language from the Heathen Period—that is, from the time previous to the English conversion to Christianity, about 597 A.D.—down to the times that immediately succeeded upon the Norman Conquest, and gives examples of the language during these six centuries, with translations of the various passages adduced. All who have an interest in the study of the English tongue, and of the changes superinduced upon it by contact with other European vernaculars, will find Mr Earle’s volume a ready and efficient guide.