NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
125
and spreading of a non-native weed over a large extent of
country.
MISCELLANEA.
"A Bee-Line."—Among the sounds of the country side in
July, there is one which often mystifies the rambler. Going
across the open meadow or stretch of common-land, may-be of a
quiet afternoon, a sudden rich chord of music strikes out over-
head. You gaze up into the blue sky, but can see nothing.
There are no trees thereabout, nor anything to hold the melody.
And yet there it is unmistakably—a high, throbbing tenor note,
much like the twang of a harp-string, but sustained and
continuous. A few steps back, you heard nothing of it ; passing
on a little way, you lose it as suddenly as it came. You retrace
your steps, and pick up the sound again ; and at last, by dint of
moving to and fro, you find out that there is a narrow band of
this mysterious music stretched diagonally across the field some
twenty feet overhead. Yet, for all your straining eyes can tell
you, there is nothing living between earth and sky to cause it.
When the great honey-yielding crops—Dutch clover, sainfoin,
yellow trefoil—are in full bloom, there are always these bee-lines
going straight as an arrow-flight between the fields and the
hives. The more plentiful the harvest, the straighter and faster
the bees seem to fly. With the trained eye of the bee master, it
is just possible to see them, if the face is turned towards the sun.
But, even then, the passing bees can be made out only as an
infinite number of fine black threads, incessantly inter-weaving
against the blue. Any exact estimate as to the speed of their
flight is well nigh impossible. Apart, however, from these times
of greatest enterprise, there are always well-defined tracks in the
air, to which the bees seem to hold as by long custom. The
open way between certain trees, and particular gaps in hedge-
rows, are used by the foragers year after year as common
thoroughfares; and, from what we already know of the ingenuity
of bee life, it is quite credible that each hive may have the
neighbouring country systematically mapped out in this way.—
Daily Chronicle, 17th July, 1909.
The Font in Coggeshall Church (E.N., vol. xv, 181-2).
—Referring to Mr. French's note, I may quote from Beaumont's
History of Coggeshall the following remarks:—The font is of