A BEE NUISANCE.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 2062, 2 October 1880, Page 3

A BEE NUISANCE.

The bees ore now being expelled from Paris by the Prefect of Police. A complaint lodged against these proverbial patterns of industry brought the fact to light that some skilful speculator had established somewhere in the outskirts of the gay capital no fewer than a thousand beehives, with a busy community of about forty millions of subjects, who rob and torment their neighbors to an alarming degree. These winged brigands, as it seems, sally forth to prey upon the sugar-boiling works with which the neighborhood is studded, and which proved to be a most profitable substitute for honey-giving flowers. The owner of one of these sugar factories, who stands first in the list of complainers, according to the “ Continental Gazette,” calculates that bees steal from him at least twenty-five thousand francs’ worth of sugar a year. The workmen at these establishments look with even more unfriendly eyes on the winged freebooters, as they suffer in person from their greediness. When the workman leaves the factory he is often covered with a sticky layer of sugar, and the watchful bees immediately pounce upon him and turn him into a field of pasture. In short, so many misdeeds are charged upon these busy insects, that it is not improbable the head of the police will issue an order for their banishment.