Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/53

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Although our author has made, and apparently without effort, a most amusing book, his objects, observable in every page, seem the benefit of the cottager and the welfare of the bee, rather than the amusement of the reader. He insists most strenuously on the worse that inutility of killing the bees; maintaining at great length, and with sound reasoning too, that it is not merely more humane but more profitable to save their lives. The substitute for killing is intoxicating the bees: this is accomplished by filling the hive with the smoke of an ignited puff-ball. "You may find in the damp meadows a fungus which children call frogs' cheese and puff balls. When quite ripe if you pinch them a dirty powder like smoke will come out. Pick them when half ripe. The largest are the best, and they often grow to the size of a man's head. Put them in a bag, and when you have squeezed them to half the size, dry them in an oven after the bread is drawn, or before the fire." When dried, this fungus will burn like tinder: it is to be put by, and when required for use "you should get a little tin box fitted to the nose of your bellows, having a sort of spout coming from it which fits the door of your beehive. Take a piece of fungus twice the size of a hen's egg, light it, and when it burns freely