I trust you will pardon my feeble attempt last week, and I wish you had been in the car with us, to have witnessed the magnificent scene, and the difficulty of describing it. At our ascent we rose, in a few seconds, 600 feet; and instantly a flood of light and beautiful scenery burst forth. Picture to yourself the Thames with its shipping; Greenwich with its stately Hospital and Park; Blackwall, Blackheath, Peckham, Camberwell, Dulwich, Norwood, St. Paul's, the Tower of London, &c. and the surrounding country, all brought immediately into your view, all apparently receding, and lit up into magnificence by the beams of a brilliant evening sun, (twenty-seven minutes past seven,) and then say who can portray or describe the scene, I say I cannot. P.T.W. * * * * * THE NATURALIST. * * * * * BEES. The faculty, or instinct of bees is sometimes at fault, for we often hear of their adopting the strangest and most unsuitable tenements for the construction of cells. A hussar's cap, so suspended from a moderate sized branch of a tree, as to be agitated by slight winds, was found filled with bees and comb. An old coat, that had been thrown over the decayed trunk of a tree and forgotten, was filled with comb and bees. Any thing, in short, either near the habitations of man, or in the forests, will serve the bees for a shelter to their combs. The average number of a hive, or swarm, is from fifteen to twenty thousand bees. Nineteen thousand four hundred and ninety-nine are neuters or working bees, five hundred are drones, and the remaining _one_ is the queen or mother! Every living thing, from man down to an ephemeral insect, pursues the bee to its destruction for the sake of the honey that is deposited in its cell, or secreted in its honey-bag. To obtain that which the bee is carrying to its hive, numerous birds and insects are on the watch, and an incredible number of bees fall victims, in consequence, to their enemies. Independently of this, there are the changes in the weather, such as high winds, sudden showers, hot sunshine; and then there is the liability to fall into rivers, besides a hundred other dangers to which bees are exposed. When a queen bee ceases to animate the hive, the bees are conscious of her loss; after searching for her through the hive, for a day or more, they examine the royal cells, which are of a peculiar construction and reversed in position, hanging vertically, with the mouth underneath. If no eggs or larvae are to be found in these cells, they then _enlarge_ several of those cells, which are appropriated to the eggs of neuters, and in which _queen eggs have been deposited_. They soon attach a royal cell to the enlarged surface, and the queen bee, enabled now to grow, protrudes itself by degrees into the royal cell, and comes out perfectly formed, to the great pleasure of the bees.