seeing a gradual depopulation of the hive, set about warding off the impending ill by superseding their mother and queen—that is, by rearing a young queen to take her place. In the case just noted the object was all right and the means to attain it all right, but, like ourselves sometimes, they were doing their work at the wrong time.
A normal colony of bees consists of one queen, some drones—more or less—and from 30,000 to 50,000 workers. The queen is the mother of the whole family—of the workers, the drones, and even her rivals, the young queens, which are to take her place in the hive, and they sometimes dispatch her in superseding her. The workers, as their name implies, do all the work of gathering honey, rearing brood, etc. The drones, like the drones in the human hive, do next to nothing, but do it well, with this difference, that the human drone fails to do well what little he does do.
The conclusion I have reached is this: the horse, the cow, the dog, the honey-bee, and other animals have a certain degree of reason and intelligence as well as instinct, and also have, some of them, strong social and domestic feelings, and are therefore entitled to greater consideration and kinder treatment at the hands of man than they sometimes get. I have also come to the conclusion, viewing the multitude of mistakes and follies of the higher animal, man, that his superior reason and more exalted faculties are not on the whole turned to as good account as the inferior reason and faculties of the so-called "brute beasts."
| COLOR IN FLOWERING PLANTS. |
By ALICE CARTER.
COLOR is as omnipresent as light. Life, the greatest of artists, uses the most common materials to produce masterpieces which sunset clouds can not surpass. The possibilities of almost infinite color variation are present in every green plant, even in its roots and stems. Appropriate conditions only are needed to bring them out; only power to help in the plant economy can intensify and make them hereditary and permanent. There is little doubt that by careful selection leaves would become as wonderfully variegated as flowers. Indeed, this has been done: some of our cultivated maples—masters of chiaroscuro—"are positively rainbow-dyed." Bright-leaved birches, beeches, begonias, and foliage plants are continually improving under man's directive care. These do not appear under natural conditions in our climate, probably because they are of little or no use. Still, there are glorious tree-paintings in our autumn woods. The red of the
