. The honey-makers. Bees. 44 The Honey-Makers up from the meadow to the fragrant cedar chest, fed him with food of tender flowers, because the Muse still dropped sweet nectar on his ; Thus sang Lycidas concerning the shepherd Comatas, who in his zeal to serve the Muses sacrificed to them his master's goats, and was therefore put in a cedar chest and shut up, but, as the song relates, kept alive for the space of a year, and until his release, by the ministrations of the Blunt-faced-Bees. Wise indeed have these insects been accounted from all time, and wonderful is the organization whi
. The honey-makers. Bees. 44 The Honey-Makers up from the meadow to the fragrant cedar chest, fed him with food of tender flowers, because the Muse still dropped sweet nectar on his ; Thus sang Lycidas concerning the shepherd Comatas, who in his zeal to serve the Muses sacrificed to them his master's goats, and was therefore put in a cedar chest and shut up, but, as the song relates, kept alive for the space of a year, and until his release, by the ministrations of the Blunt-faced-Bees. Wise indeed have these insects been accounted from all time, and wonderful is the organization which enables them to accomplish their manifold and clever tasks. Whether they fed Comatas in his cedar chest some may question ; but this cannot be questioned, that if they did feed him, they found him there not by the sense of sight or by means of any organ such as we possess, but because they were endowed with the most mysterious and remark- able of organs, the antennas or feelers. Between the eyes of the " Blunt-faced-Bees " reach out the feelers, and these several-jointed organs, as has been intimated, are matters of importance. With them the bee hears. With them it smells, and by means of them it con- verses. Deprived of them, it becomes a stricken thing, helpless, deaf, dumb, and despairing. Huber experimented by cutting off the antennae. The removal of one antenna produced no observable effect. Not so the re- moval of both, for then the bee became little more than an idiot or lunatic and, unable to perform the necessary duties of the hive, soon perished. The queen-bee, when deprived of her antennas entirely lost her maternal instinct, moved aimlessly about, avoided. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original Morley, Margaret Warner, 1858-1923. Chicago, A. C. McClurg and company
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookpublisherch, booksubjectbees
