flowing with milk and honey.' Still later the famous riddle propounded by Sampson 'Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness,' had its origin in the fact that Sampson had found a swarm of bees in the carcass of a lion. Indeed many are the allusions both in the Old and New Testaments to honey and bees. Aristotle wrote of the busy insect more than three hundred years B.C., and about three hundred years later Virgil makes mention of them. Swarmendam, a Dutchman, in the middle of the seventeenth century wrote a book about 'The Natural History of Bees.' We are also greatly indebted to Huber for his researches in apiculture. "Mr. Langstroth, sometimes styled 'The father of American Apiculture,' has given us in 'The Hive and Honey Bee,' a very valuable treatise on the subject of bee-keeping. "So much for the general history of bee-keeping, let us find out about the natural history of the bee. The bee belongs to the class _Insecta_, to the subclass _Hexapoda_, to the order _Hymenoptera_ and to the family _Apidea_, to the genus _Apis_. The _Apis Ligustica_ or Italian bee is the one we will describe minutely. These bees were first noticed by Spinola, in 1805, who gave them the name of Liguren bee, by which name they were known in Europe. The name was derived from the fact that the bees came from a province in Northern Italy, north of the Ligurian Gulf or Gulf of Geneva. This region is shut off from Northern Europe by the Alps, and here in the warm, genital climate of Italy, was developed a distinct race of bees, the gentle and beautiful Italians. In 186o Mr. S. P. Parsons brought to America the first colony of Italian bees imported direct from Italy. The Italians are now generally considered the best for practical bee-keeping, although there are many other classes which are liked. Among other varieties are the Cypians, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Dalmatians, the Herze-governians, the Smyrnian, the German or black bees and the Carniolans. "Let us confine ourselves to the consideration of the Italians. Bees are divided into three general classes : The queen bee or the mother bee of the hive ; the worker bee, who gathers the honey, and the drone or male bee. From illustrations on the blackboard you perceive that the queen bee has short wings, but is long and slender in shape, being about seven-eighth of an inch in length ; she is a fully developed female, and the entire base of her abdomen and sometimes nearly the whole of it is a golden yellow. There is but one queen in each colony and it is her function to lay eggs ; sometimes in the honey season she lays as many as two or three thousand a day. The queen may live from three to four years and is pre-eminently a home body, leaving the hive but twice, once when about five days old, when she takes her wedding flight and meets a drone in mid-air, and later on when she accompanies a first swarm. The other inhabitants of the hive are her loyal subjects and feed her, cares her and pay her all due deference. The worker bees are undeveloped females, and are shorter than the queen, measuring little more than half an inch, and have long hairy _linguflug_ or tongues, an illustration of which is given, and are the honey gathers of the colony. There are generally from fifteen to sixty thousand of them present during the honey season. At this time, called the busy season, the life of the worker bee is of short duration, sometimes lasting but a few weeks, but during the cooler part of the year they live from six to nine months. They have a sack for carrying the honey which they gather from the flowers with their long tongues ; they also have grooves on their thighs which contains the pollen which they collect in little balls with which to feed the young and immature bees. The worker bees also carry to the hive a resinous gum called propolis, which they obtain from the leaves, buds and trunks of trees and plants and use for filling in holes and cracks in the hive. Both the queen bee and worker bees are provided with an instrument of defense, the sting. Enlarged by the microscope or as drawn on the blackboard one perceives it to be a beautifully fashioned