570 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



the requisite ration of pollen and honey, lays her egg, then closes the 

 cell and leaves her offspring to begin life unattended. Several Andrenas 

 may dig their shafts close together, however, the result being a neigh- 

 borhood of homes. 



Another miner, smallest of all the bees but very abundant, is Halictus. 

 It is no larger than an ant. We were all brought up, I believe, to call 

 it the sweat bee. Several of these unite and form a common vertical 

 shaft, from different levels of which they make side passages extending 

 to their individual cells. "While Andrena builds villages composed of 

 individual homes, Halictus makes cities composed of apartment houses." 



Similar to Andrena in its building habits is Augochlora, a familiar 

 bee of a beautiful metallic green color. Last summer this bee was found 

 in considerable numbers on the hollyhock, the copious pollen of this 

 flower being to the bee's particular liking. 



Certain bees of both short-tongued and long-tongued families are called 

 cuckoos, for like the roguish bird of that name they slyly place their 

 eggs in the cells of the industrious solitary bees. These cuckoos are 

 often brightly colored and some of them might be mistaken for wasps. 



Some of the long-tongued solitary bees bear a striking resemblance to 

 our friend, the honey bee. In our study of pumpkin blossoms and their 

 visitors, last summer we saw sipping the copious supply of nectar from 

 the cup under the stamens, wherever by good fortune the stamen tube 

 had a fissure large enough to admit of the insection of a proboscis, bees 

 that were just the size of the hive bee but were little off color. A study 

 of the wing-veins, which vary so greatly in different bees as to furnish 

 our best standard for classification, told us that most of our pumpkin 

 visitors were not honey bees. All of them, however, had a remarkable 

 number of the huge pollen grains of the pumpkin upon their bodies, and 

 as they jostle against the spreading sticky stigmas of the pistillate blos- 

 som the latter is no doubt furnished with its most effecacious mode of 

 pollination. 



One familiar family of long-tongued bees is Megachile, a whitish fuzzy 

 individual with the tip of the short abdomen partly turned up. Mrs. 

 Megachile is a leaf cutter who lines her cells in the hollow of some stem 

 with bits of rose leaf deftly cut out by her mandibles. 



The bumblebee, less diligent than its better known cousin, and having 

 a less elaborate division of labor, is nevertheless a most interesting 

 creature. There are drones, queens, and workers as among the honey 

 bees, but the colony, instead of containing many thousand individuals, 

 has at best but a few hundred. As in the case of the hornets and yellow 

 jackets, only the queen lives over winter. In the spring it is necessary 

 for her to build up the colony by her unaided efforts until she can be re- 

 lieved by her first worker offspring. 



Very like the bumblebee in appearance is the guest bee who makes 

 herself at home in the bumblebee colony. She does never a stroke 

 toward the task of provisioning the colony, although she does build cells 

 for her own eggs. There are no workers among these bees, for the en- 

 tire task of gathering food, feeding the young, and housek€eping in 

 general, is left to the host. Why the bumblebees tolerate so lazy a 



