compel a colony of bees to emigrate, and seek another habitation. In this country, where the apiary is generally situated near the dwelling, _birds_ do not commit any great ravages. +Mr. Espinasse+ thinks that in general they come only for _dead bees_ and _larvæ_, which may have been thrown out of the hives. But in America, according to +Mr. Hector St. John+, _the king bird_, the protector of corn-fields from the depredation of crows, is a great destroyer of bees. After shooting these birds, Mr. St. John has found bees in their craws, from one of which he took as many as a hundred-and-seventy-one: on laying them all on a blanket in the sun, fifty-four of them returned to life, licked themselves clean, and joyfully went back to their hives. Many wonderful tales of this kind have been told,--such as the recovery of flies that had been inclosed for a considerable time in bottles of liquor (madeira). An instance of this is related by Wildman, who says his informant was a very ingenious and accurate gentleman:--that the madeira had been brought, in bottle, from Virginia to London, and that the flies when exposed to a warm sun for an hour or two, were so completely reanimated, as to take wing; thus putting to the test, as Wildman's friend observed, the truth of the opinion, that a fly cannot be drowned.--A very marvellous tale was related last year in the newspapers, of the recovery of some apparently dead bees after the substance containing them had been submitted to a considerable heat or to a chemical process. Mr. St. John's statement is within the bounds of credibility: it seems to have been a case of suspended animation of short continuance, not produced by exposure to gas or to any liquid likely to prove deleterious to them; and it is well known that bees often recover even after suffocation with sulphurous gas. Bees may be immersed in water for a long time, without loss of life. Reaumur saw them recover after nine hours immersion. Dr. Evans accidentally left some eighteen hours in water; when laded out with a spoon and placed in the sunshine the majority of them recovered. Other animals, of analogous species, exhibit still more wonderful resurrections. De Geer has observed one species of mite to live for some time in spirit of wine; and Mr. Kirby states that being desirous of preserving a very pretty lady-bird, and not knowing how to accomplish it, he immersed it in geneva. "After leaving it," says he, "in this situation a day and a night, and seeing it without motion, I concluded it was dead, and laid it in the sun to dry. It no sooner, however, felt the warmth than it began to move, and afterwards flew away." This circumstance laid the foundation of Mr. K.'s study of entomology.