46 Cincinnati Society of Natural History. 



aid whatever, this smooth surface, and again behind it the smooth 

 basal parts of the trophi before it I'eaches the labium. Even in the 

 hive and humble bees, there is a narrow, smooth place along the upper 

 surface at the base of the tongue where the hairs are absent, and 

 the fluid can there derive no aid from them in ascending. Reaumer's 

 experiment in coloring the honey seems to me equally inconclusive. 

 The mode suggested in "Homes without Hands," that of scraping ofl[' the 

 nectar by the mandibles, I do not understand. I do not see how the 

 tongue can, with its peculiar mode of articulation, be brought into a 

 position in which the nectar can be scraped off so as to remain on the 

 inner side of the mandibles next to the pharynx, and if once placed 

 there it seems to me that it would naturally flow away from the 

 pharynx toward the base of the mandibles, or down over the other 

 organs of the mouth. 



There are other reasons for supposing that the bee is a suctorial as 

 well as a chewing insect. The sucking stomach it has in common 

 with the suctorial orders, lepidoptera and diptera, though less devel- 

 oped than in those orders; those are not honey-making orders of in- 

 sects. If the object of this organ is, as Burmiester states, to withdraw 

 the air from the oesophagus and tube, it should be present in all these 

 sucking instruments, and need not be looked for in those which do not 

 feed by suction. But if, as Rev. Mr. Wood suggests, its sole office is 

 to convert nectar into honey, it is strange that it should be more de- 

 veloped in orders that do not make honey than in bees. Prof. Owen 

 (Anatomy of Invertebrates) states that "Hunter made experiments to 

 determine the function of the apendiculated crop. ' I kept a fly,' he 

 says, 'for twelve hours without food, and then gave it milk, and killed 

 it, and found no milk in the crop, but it had got through almost the 

 whole tract of the intestines: here the animal had immediate occasion 

 for food, therefore the milk did not go into the crop.' Another time, 

 Hunter killed his flies after they had drunk their All, and fountl the 

 crop full, as well as the stomach and intestines. He suspects, there- 

 fore, that the crop serves as a reservoir, and ' that when there is more 

 food than what is immediately necessary, then it is thrown into the 

 crop to be used in future.' The result of Hunter's flrst experiment, 

 and the absence of the crop in the flea and some other suctorial in- 

 sects, negatives the idea of Burmiester, that the crop in hymenoptera, 

 lepidoptera, and diptera, promotes the suction of food by the voluntary 

 power of self-expansion, if even the structure justiffed the idea; but 

 on the contrary, they prove it to be a receptacle of nutriment." 



But the fact that the sucking stomach is used to store food for the 

 future use of the insect itself, does not prove that its object is the 

 elaboration of lione^', and is not inconsistent with Reaumer's sugges- 

 tion that this is the office of the membraneous sack; and though Hun- 



