When a queen bee ceases to animate the hive, the bees are conscious of her loss; after searching for her through the hive, for a day or more, they examine the royal cells, which are of a peculiar construction and reversed in position, hanging vertically, with the mouth underneath. If no eggs or larvae are to be found in these cells, they then enlarge several of those cells, which are appropriated to the eggs of neuters, and in which queen eggs have been deposited. They soon attach a royal cell to the enlarged surface, and the queen bee, enabled now to grow, protrudes itself by degrees into the royal cell, and comes out perfectly formed, to the great pleasure of the bees.
The bee seeks only its own gratification in procuring honey and in regulating its household, and as, according to the old proverb, what is one man's meat is another's poison, it sometimes carries honey to its cell, which is prejudicial to us. Dr. Barton in the fifth volume, of the "American Philosophical Transactions," speaks of several plants that yield a poisonous syrup, of which the bees partake without injury, but which has been fatal to man. He has enumerated some of these plants, which ought to be destroyed wherever they are seen, namely, dwarf-laurel, great laurel, kalmia latifolia, broad-leaved moorwort, Pennsylvania mountain-laurel, wild honeysuckle (the bees, cannot get much of this,) and the stramonium or Jamestown-weed.
A young bee can be readily distinguished from an old one, by the greyish coloured down that covers it, and which it loses by the wear and tear of hard labour; and if the bee be not destroyed before the season is over, this down entirely disappears, and the groundwork of the insect is seen, white or black. On a close examination, very few of these black or aged bees, will be seen at the opening of the spring, as, not having the stamina of those that are younger, they perish from inability to encounter the vicissitudes of winter.—American Farmer's Manual.
THE ELM.
(To the Editor of the Mirror.)
I shall be obliged to any of your correspondents who can inform me from whence came the term witch-elm, a name given to a species of elm tree, to distinguish it from the common elm. Some people have conjectured that it was a corruption of white elm, and so called from the silvery whiteness of its leaves when the sun shines upon them; but this is hardly probable, as Sir F. Bacon in his "Silva Silvarum, or Natural History, in Ten Centuries," speaks of it under the name of weech-elm.