NATURE seems to have imposed a restraint upon the undue increase of all its creatures, by creating, to check it, others that prey upon them. It thus enlarges the sphere of its activity by making life accessory to life, and promoting thereby a more extended enjoyment of all its pleasures. Other forms are brought into existence, and other terms given to duration than those which the laws of life attach to specific organization. No abatement is thereby made upon the quantity of contemporaneous vitality, for what subsides in one rises in another, and the undulation of the waves is perpetual. Does the quantity of life, extant upon the earth, vary? Perhaps mortality ever comes in some shape to prevent it, when excess threatens to render its energy effete. Yet under every circumstance the wise arrangements of Providence suffice, for everything has its enemies or its parasites, which are also enemies, but frequently in disguise. For defence there is an implanted instinctive fear, or abhorrence; and the creature is then left to its skill, prudence, or strength, either to evade or to mitigate, to the extent of its capability, the danger of the attack. We find the bees are not at all exempted from this prevailing condition. They have many enemies and parasites of remarkably differing organization. They are attacked by many kinds of birds, among which the _Merops Apiaster_ (or bee-eater) is conspicuous. All the swallow tribe prey upon them, as do the shrikes and some of the soft-billed small birds, and also many small quadrupeds when they can find the opportunity. Wasps also attack them, but they do not often get entangled in spiders’ nets, being generally too strong for the retention of its meshes, but I have seen a _Bombus_ enveloped in a tangle of its wonderful filament. The wild bees’ parasites are of two kinds, personal, and such which, like the young of cuckoos, live at the expense of the offspring. The personal parasites are again of two kinds, for bees are infested with several kinds of _Acari_, and once I found a _Bombus_ upon the ground in Coombe Wood so swarming with the _Acarus_ that it lay hopelessly helpless until I threw it into a pool of water, when its _attachés_ were washed away. But the poor bee seemed so prostrated by their attack, that even when freed from them it had not energy to fly, and having landed it I left it to the kindly nursing of nature.