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Updated: May 20, 2025
When it was found that the red clover would not flourish for want of penetrating insects, the humble bee was imported, and with compete success, as many a field now ruddy with crimson blossom testifies. The common English bee is found wild in the forest, where it hives in hollow trees, and robs its competitors the honey-eating native birds of much of their food.
Some of these birds, and especially the toucans, have bills beautifully adapted for picking up the ants before they reach the nest. Many of the smaller birds build on the branches of the bull's-horn thorn, which is always thickly covered with small stinging honey-eating ants, that would not allow the Ecitons to ascend these trees.
Why do insects which appear close together in all our classifications possess such opposite tastes? If they spring from a common stock, how did the consumption of flesh supplant the consumption of honey? How did the Lamb become a Wolf? This is the great problem which was once set us, in an inverse form, by the Spotted Sapyga, a honey-eating relative of the flesh-eating Scolia.
A most unpleasant mixture seems inevitable. Picture the honey-eating grub floating on liquid provisions and fouling them at intervals with its excretions! The least movement of the hinder-part would cause the whole to amalgamate; and what a broth that would make for the delicate nursling! No, it cannot be; those dainty epicures must have some method of escaping these horrors.
Here in September great masses of the plant are already showing a greenish cream-colour of the opening blossoms, which will be at their perfection in October. Then, when the sun shines, there will be no lingering red admiral, nor blue fly or fly of any colour, nor yellow wasp, nor any honey-eating or late honey-gathering insect that will not be here to feed on the ivy's sweetness.
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