There are many singular incidents related by Huber, which, if they are not true, one may exclaim, "The more's the pity." When he notes, that, in a time of disorder in the hive, he beheld the queen ascend a royal cell and seat herself upon it as if it were a throne, and, having sympathized for a season, suddenly assume the awful attitude and strike her disloyal people motionless, it interests us like some recital of the haps and heroics of Boadicea and her Britons. It is remembered that in the early days of what are known as spiritual manifestations, while one wit thought our furniture made of Dodonean oak, another regarded the manifestations as a wise provision, in aid of the customary May ramble of city families from their respective domiciles. It is from a similarly provident point of view, with the current price of coal, that we should look at Huber's statement concerning the heat of a hive, when he tells us that twenty hives will warm an apartment comfortably, and twenty-five, occasionally well shaken, will furnish the proper temperature for a conservatory,--which throws Count Rumford's feat of boiling water without the aid of fire far into the shade. But when Huber proceeds to say that the queen is followed on her rounds by a royal guard, who wait on her with obsequious reverence, although it seems to be a pretty custom enough, the actual custom may be found a far prettier one: for the queen attends to her affairs, as others are assured, quite unaccompanied; only as workers at all times cover the comb, when she passes from group to group, each bee for a moment leaves labor, bestows a caress upon its mother, offers her honey, refreshes her, sees her pass to the next group, which hastens to do the same, while the first returns to the business of the moment. The elder Huber taxes the credulity, however, hardly more than his son does, in presenting a drawing of humble-bees hindering a toppling comb from falling by taking acrobatic postures, standing on their heads and supporting it with their hind legs till relieved, converting themselves, in fact, into a kind of flying-buttresses. Indeed, the trouble with all these things is, that naturalists persist in endowing the little creatures with human passions; and having once given the rein to imagination, it runs away with them. Now and then they find themselves in a quagmire; but sometimes the result is simply amusing, as in old Butler's most graphic and entertaining description of the pillage of a weak hive by its rich and powerful neighbor, in the "Feminine Monarchie." Yet these stories have been told ever since the Flood. Aristotle assures us, that, when a bee has a headwind to encounter, he ballasts himself with a little pebble between his feet; and the Abbé della Rocca, who made observations on the bees of the Grecian Archipelago, had the pleasure of witnessing the circumstance in person,--which would cause one to conjecture that