The reader must now perceive the importance of feeding, and that the transition from health to languor and death is less frequently to be ascribed to disease, than to the want of the necessary means to continue the vital energy. The suddenness of the unhappy change may reasonably lead the uninformed or improvident to suppose that an incurable malady has visited their hives:--so long as the store of honey lasted, there were health and prosperity; but that gone, famine commenced its ravages, and an extinction of the bees of course followed. A little foresight and a little trouble would have kept off the calamity. I am perhaps tediously particular in this notice. I wish to impress my noviciate bee-friends with the necessity of thus providing for their hives, that the most frequent agent of mischief,--hunger,--may be kept out of them. Still further let me also recommend to them, on the approach of winter to have the floors of their hives or boxes well cleaned from insects and their eggs, and from all heterogeneous matter. This is a business which the bees themselves, when the weather admits of it, are particularly attentive to; indeed they refrain, as much as possible, from dropping their excrement upon the floors, taking advantage of every fine day in winter to sally forth and get rid of it. This was proved by the experiments of Mr. Hunter: indeed they sometimes fall a sacrifice to their personal neatness in this respect, their bodies becoming so swelled, from the accumulation of fæces, as completely to disable them from flying, when the weather is sufficiently favourable to admit of their going out; in consequence of which, they fall to the ground and perish. +Schirach+ and others recommend, in cases of _Faux Couvain_, to cut out the infected combs, and to clean and fumigate the hive by burning aromatics under it. In +Butler's+ _Feminine Monarchie_, we are gravely told of a certain bee-mistress, who, finding her hives fruitless, and their tenants pining away with sickness, by the advice of another female, went to receive the eucharist, and having kept it in her mouth, placed it, on her return home, in one of the diseased hives. The plague ceased; honey accumulated; and, on examining the inside, she found a waxen chapel and altar, of wondrous architecture, and even bells of the same materials.--Gent. Mag. 1809. p. 316. To prove that there is much of fancy in the traditional accounts respecting bee-maladies, I will mention _the various hypotheses concerning dysentery_. +Columella+ speaks of its arising from the bees feeding upon honey collected from elm and spurge blossoms; my own neighbourhood abounds with both; but I never met with nor scarcely heard of dysentery among the bees here. +Evelyn+ in his _Sylva_ expresses doubts upon the subject; and +Dr. Evans+ says he made particular inquiries of some friends in Worcestershire, which (like this county--Herefordshire) abounds with elms, without obtaining satisfactory information.