The True Bees 



hard-working neuters or workers. Their function in the com- 

 munity is simply to fertilize the queens at the proper time, and 

 then they are of no further use in the world. 



The Apoidea are now subdivided into no less than fourteen 

 fullfledged fiimilies. These include the Apidae, or true honey 

 bees, the Bombidae, or bumblebees, the solitary bees of the 

 Anthophoridae, the cuckoo bees of the family Nomadidae, the 

 small carpenter bees of the family Ceratinidae, the large carpenter 

 bees of the family Xylocopidae, the mason, leaf-cutting and 

 potter bees of the family Megachilidae, the parasitic bees of the 

 family Stelidae, the sharp-tongued burrowing bees of the family 

 Andrenidae; the blunt-tongued burrowing bees of the family 

 Colletidae, and others. 



The habits of the bees of these diverse families vary greatly, 

 and most of the characteristics which they have in common have 

 already been referred to. All, from their flower-visiting habits, 

 are of great importance in the cross fertilization of plants, and 

 without their aid the health of the plant world would suffer and 

 its infinite variety would hardly have been achieved. 



The most famous of all bees is naturally the common honey 

 bee, an importation from Europe, not a native, which by the 

 hand of man has become a true domesticated animal. The life 

 history of this creature has been so often written about and may 

 so easily be learned by consulting any encyclopedia or standard 

 general work of reference that it does not seem necessary to de- 

 scribe it in detail here. The methods of bee culture in use admit 

 of ready study of its economy.* In this brief summary of the 

 general characteristics of bees we shall, therefore, confine our- 

 selves to the wild and less known forms. A bumblebee has been 

 selected for the typical life history, and little need therefore be 

 said of the large and important family to which that species be- 

 longs, except to state that bumblebees now occur in most parts 

 of the world, and that they are especially abundant in temperate 

 and even boreal regions, large numbers inhabiting far northern 

 localities where they abound in the brief artic summer, and where 

 they live a short but extremely busy life on account of the 

 crowding together of the flowering periods of sub-polar plants. 



*One of the strongest bits of descriptive writing known to me is Tolstoi's de- 

 scription of a queenless bee hive, in " War and Peace," where he likens Moscow on 

 the approach of the French army to a hive deserted by the queen bee. 



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