Notes of the Day.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3571, 10 July 1912, Page 4

Notes of the Day.

ALL A PUZZLE AND A MYSTERY

Packed away in an obscure comer of ;a newspaper (says a Home journal), there appeared the other day a statement that should concern every dweller in the country. It was to the effect that, “down in the West Country there is consternation among beekeepers," who find themselves baffled by the new form of distemper, paralysis, or whatever it is to be called, which has broken cut again in its most virulent form, not only in the Isle of Wight, but in many of the sea shires.” When Air. Gladstone re--1 commended the cultivation of jam fruits to the villages of England as a money-making pursuit, he might have added, also, bee-keeping. But the keeping of bees is net only profitable, but if intelligently carried on is one of the most fascinating occupations imaginable. For the bee is one_of the great mysteries of animated Nature. The oldest civilisation in the world— China, even that seems to have stopped at finite perfection in a _ topsyturvy way, ages before the time of Abraham-—in a mushroom growth compared with the antiquity of beecivilisation. . Tens of thousands of years, perhaps, before man had discovered how to chip a flint into an axeliead, these nations of winged Lilliputian creatures had evolved a perfect olan of life, and had solved problems that are only now beginning to trouble mankind. Some of their solutions, .such as the triumph of matriarch v, are sufficient to make men think hard, if, as has been suggested by a student of bee-life, mankind will ultimately adopt the same solutions. It is all a puzzle and a mystery, and the wiser course is to watch these bees going down into the yellow cups of the crocuses and coming out smeared with pollen, and then making their way straight back —by a “bee-line,” in fact —to the furious life of the hiveThere are many pretty legends associated with the origin of the bee. and it would net surprise anyone who has studied the creature if. as Edison predicts. the bees’ method cf flight will provide the solution of flying by men.