30 HUNTING AMONG THE 



hole. As soon as the roll is taken into the burrow and placed in its 

 right position, the little bee cuts a very much smaller circular piece 

 from the tree, and flies back again with it to fill up one end of 

 this curious cell. It then flies off to collect sufficient honey and 

 pollen to fill the cell, and, in the same way as Osmia rufa, lays 

 an egg in the middle of this heap of food. It then once more cuts 

 another small circular piece of leaf to fill up and complete the 

 cell. This work it continues until it has four or five cells in its 

 burrow, each of which contains an egg, to develop in time into a 

 perfect Megachile. There is, however, an enemy to this bee also, 

 in the form of Trypoxylo?i figjihis, which lays its egg in the cell in 

 the same way as Chrysis ignita does towards Ostnia rufa. 



I will now only mention one more subject connected with 

 Hymenoptera which must end what I have to say to you to-night. 

 In my garden I have several hives of Apis ligustica, an Italian 

 bee, with a bright-coloured body. This is a domestic bee, and 1 

 keep it for its honey as well as for investigating the wonderfully 

 interesting facts connected with its life-history. Many of you 

 know without being told that there are three different kinds of 

 bees in a hive, viz. — the Queen Bee, of which there is only one in 

 each hive ; the Drones, which are the males, and which are killed 

 off as soon as the summer is over ; and the Working Bees, which 

 are undeveloped females and which do the whole work of the 

 hive. The Queen lays between 2,000 to 3,000 eggs per day. 

 The larva, after hatching out, lives only three or four days before 

 it is full fed. It is then sealed up by the bees and turns into a 

 chrysalis, which comes out into a perfect bee in about seventeen 

 days. This is the usual round of metamorphosis in the worker bee. 

 But the development of a Queen is still more wonderful In 

 view of having an exhibit for the Society, I took the Queen away 

 from one of my hives, and within five minutes of my doing so the 

 whole hive was in a terrible uproar ; they found they were a 

 colony without a head, and for nearly half-an-hour they were 

 nearly mad, flying in thousands round about the hive in search of 

 her. Within a few hours, however, they had quieted down, and 

 on opening the hive I found that they had selected nearly a dozen 

 eggs in cells in different parts of the hive, and were breaking 

 down the walls of the cells all round in order to make a larger 



