cherry blossoms, snaps them up wholesale. Quick as lightning that
subtle but clammy tongue darts forth, and the unsuspecting bee is gone.
Virgil also accuses the titmouse and the woodpecker of preying upon the
bees, and our kingbird has been charged with the like crime, but the
latter devours only the drones. The workers are either too small and
quick for it, or else it dreads their sting.

Virgil, by the way, had little more than a child's knowledge of the
honey-bee. There is little fact and much fable in his fourth Georgic.
If he had ever kept bees himself, or even visited an apiary, it is hard
to see how he could have believed that the bee in its flight abroad
carried a gravel stone for ballast:--

"And as when empty barks on billows float,
With Sandy ballast sailors trim the boat;
So bees bear gravel stones, whose poising weight
Steers through the whistling winds their steady flight;"

or that when two colonies made war upon each other they issued forth
from their hives led by their kings and fought in the air, strewing the
ground with the dead and dying:--

"Hard hailstones lie not thicker on the plain,
Nor shaken oaks such show'rs of acorns rain."

It is quite certain he had never been bee-hunting. If he had, we
should have had a fifth Georgic. Yet he seems to have known that bees
sometimes escaped to the woods:--

"Nor bees are lodged in hives alone, but found