We have no reason to charge our swallows with the crime of bee-eating. Domestic fowls will sometimes regale themselves with a meal of live bees, it they can reach the entrances to the hives, so that it is advisable to forbid their access to them. Mice occasionally effect an entrance, especially into skeps, and annoy the inhabitants by their disagreeable odour, and by gnawing the combs, and eating brood and honey. The winter is the time when there is most danger from these plunderers, as the bees are then too torpid with the cold to notice and to attack the intruders. It is easy to prohibit their inroads, by sufficiently contracting the entrances, and preventing their gnawing the rims of the hives, or getting under the top coverings. Moths, being active at night, require constant watchfulness on the part of the bee-sentinels to exclude them from their abodes. Attracted partly by the favourable conditions for egg-hatching, through the steady warmth kept up in the hives, they lay their eggs in crevices, and along the borders of bee-homes. The larvæ, when able to crawl, make their way over the combs, which, with their contents, they greedily devour, and if attacking in large numbers they sometimes prove fatal to a stock. [Illustration: Fig. 42.--The Enemies of Bees.] The two kinds most destructive are the British wax-moth, _Achroia grisella_, and the _Galleria mellonella_. The latter is more troublesome in Italy than in our own country. If the population of a hive be strong and in thoroughly sound condition, there is not much danger to be apprehended from either of these foes. Should, however, a colony be weak, and still more if queenless, such a hold may be gained by these their lepidopterous enemies, as will be wholly ruinous. Combs in store are yet more liable to their attacks, but the moths may be dislodged, and their eggs or larvæ destroyed, by exposing such combs to the fumes of burning brimstone. An examination of hive-coverings and floor-boards in the spring and autumn, and the destruction of all grubs found about them, will often save much trouble from the moths. The presence of these intruders among the combs may be detected by the occurrence of their excrement, resembling grains of very fine gunpowder, on the floor-boards. The death's-head moth, _Acherontia Atropos_, is also said, by some writers, to be troublesome to apiarians; but it is too rare an insect to be seriously destructive. A parasitic louse, called _Braula cœca_, is occasionally found in considerable numbers in hives on the Continent. Happily, the English climate does not appear to suit its constitution well, so that its occurrence is not very frequent, and is generally the result of the introduction of Ligurians and other foreign varieties into an apiary.