"Five-hundredth" Quotes from Famous Books
... Here is a calculation, which will show how industrious the "busy" bee really is. Let us suppose the insects confine their attentions to clover-fields. Each head of clover contains about sixty separate flower-tubes, in each of which is a portion of sugar not exceeding the five-hundredth part of a grain. Therefore, before one grain of sugar can be got, the bee must insert its proboscis into 500 clover-tubes. Now there are 7,000 grains in a pound, so that it follows that 3,500,000 clover-tubes must be sucked in order to obtain ... — Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various |