Note 2 — NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN YELLOW ALP-BEE. (Apis helvetica.)

The assertions of many German bee-cultivators that the Italian bee has German blood, as not even the Alps, like a Chinese wall, would prevent them from mixing with German bees, may sound very well and comprehensible on paper, but the matter would be quite changed if such a biographer would take the trouble to make, on the spot, inquiries which would present a scientific basis-. The last German place from the Julier-pass is called Stalla, between which place and Poschiavo (a distance of fifty miles) there are no bees. In May, and sometimes to the end of the month, the road leads from Stalla by the Julier-pass (nine miles), often through snow, then Oberengadien is passed (where not a single bee exists), and then through the Bernina-pass which demands a march, in the snow, of about fifteen miles, and passes are the lowest points for passage.

Now, I should like to see that swarm of bees that could take its wedding-flight from Stalla to Poschiavo over two mountains covered with snow (for the snow does not melt in June, and even in July and August the temperature is so low that every bee would perish) for the purpose of mating with the nearest borderers in Poschiavo. The same may be said of the entire chain of passes, on the Bernhardin, Gotthard, Splugen, Lukmanier, nowhere for thirty miles round is a bee to be found, for they cannot exists where, through the neighbourhood of the glaciers, the air is so cooled down. There is an end to the insect-world, and we may be sure that it has not entered into the mind of an Italian to import a hive from German-Switzerland, by which German blood may have been brought into Italy.