. American bee journal. Bee culture; Bees. Petrified Honey Comb. Mr. E. R. Douglass, of Martinsburg, Mo., has sent us another piece of this peculiar stone formation, which he says he picked up in a neighbor's yard, and asks " What is itV" Our friend Prof. Cook very kindly answers this question by the following interesting article : Mr. Editor : In your November number, p. 372, you speak of petrified honey comb, trom Seneca Falls, N. Y. We have many such specimens in our museum. In some cases the cells are hardly larger than a pin- head, in others a quarter of an inch in diameter-. Th
. American bee journal. Bee culture; Bees. Petrified Honey Comb. Mr. E. R. Douglass, of Martinsburg, Mo., has sent us another piece of this peculiar stone formation, which he says he picked up in a neighbor's yard, and asks " What is itV" Our friend Prof. Cook very kindly answers this question by the following interesting article : Mr. Editor : In your November number, p. 372, you speak of petrified honey comb, trom Seneca Falls, N. Y. We have many such specimens in our museum. In some cases the cells are hardly larger than a pin- head, in others a quarter of an inch in diameter-. These are not fossil honey comb as you vpere led to believe, though the resemblance is so striking that no wonder you and the public general ly are deceived. These speci- mens are fossil coral, which the paleontolo- gist places in the genus Favosites ; favosus being a common species in our State. They are very abundant in the lime rock in north- ern Michigan, and are very properly denomi- nated honey-stone coral. The animals of which these were once the skeletons, so to speak, are not insects at all, though often called so by men of considerable informa- tion. It would be no greater blunder to call an oyster or a clam an insect. The species of the genus Favosites first appeared in the Upper Silurian rocks, cul- minated in the Devonian, and disappeared. ^^ in the early Carboniferous. No insects ap- peared till the Devonian age, and no Hyme- noptera—bees, wasps, etc.—till after the Carboniferous. So the old-time Favosites, reared its limestone columns and helped to build islands and continents untold ages- millions upon millions of years—before any flower bloomed, or any bee sipped the pre- cious nectar. In some specimens of this hon^-stone coral, there are to be seen banks of cells, much resembling the paper cells of some of our wasps. This might be called wasp-stone coral, except that both styles were wrought by the self-same *, I enclose drawings illustrating tw
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1860, booksubjectbees, bookyear1861
