is one bee there are usually five or six, and the hum is that of a group;
here there only appeared one or two insects to a pine. Nor was the buzz
like that of the humble-bee, for every now and then one came along low
down, flying between the stems, and his note was much deeper. By-and-by,
crossing to the edge of the plantation, where the boughs could be
examined, being within reach, I found it was wasps. A yellow wasp
wandered over the blue-green needles till he found a pair with a drop of
liquid like dew between them. There he fastened himself and sucked at it;
you could see the drop gradually drying up till it was gone. The largest
of these drops were generally between two needles--those of the Scotch
fir or pine grow in pairs--but there were smaller drops on the outside of
other needles. In searching for this exuding turpentine the wasps filled
the whole plantation with the sound of their wings. There must have been
many thousands of them. They caused no inconvenience to any one walking
in the copse, because they were high overhead.

Watching these wasps I found two cocoons of pale yellow silk on a branch
of larch, and by them a green spider. He was quite green--two shades,
lightest on the back, but little lighter than the green larch bough. An
ant had climbed up a pine and over to the extreme end of a bough; she
seemed slow and stupefied in her motions, as if she had drunken of the
turpentine and had lost her intelligence. The soft cones of the larch
could be easily cut down the centre with a penknife, showing the
structure of the cone and the seeds inside each scale. It is for these
seeds that birds frequent the fir copses, shearing off the scales with
their beaks. One larch cone had still the tuft at the top--a pineapple in
miniature. The loudest sound in the wood was the humming in the trees;
there was no wind, no sunshine; a summer day, still and shadowy, under
large clouds high up. To this low humming the sense of hearing soon
became accustomed, and it served but to render the silence deeper. In