All these, and a host of other facts as to bee-life, are crowded into the bewildered brain of the tiro until its capacity is exhausted, and he can take no more. He begins to see, at length, that he is approaching a great matter too fast, and from the wrong direction. Like a scholar who, resolving on a new and difficult branch of study, commences at the end of his treatise instead of at the beginning, he finds himself in the midst of terms and equations of which he knows nothing. All this desultory peering into hive-windows, and listening to scraps of astounding information, is nothing but opening the book of bee-life here and there at odd disjointed pages, getting a swift impression of certain lurid, kaleidoscopic details, but no grounding in the consecutive science of the facts. There is nothing for it—if he be resolved to know the life of the honey-bee truly—but to turn back to the first page of the volume, and steadily work his way through to the end—if end there be. * * * * * All know the English honey-bee—the Black Bee, as she is called, partly to distinguish her from her foreign rivals, and partly, it would seem, because she is not black at all, but a rich brown—but all do not know her origin. Probably she came to us from the tropics by easy stages, swarm out-flying swarm, until the most adventurous crossed the English Channel in remote ages, when it was only a narrow race of water, or even before Great Britain was detached from the mainland.