On the Tongue [Lingua) of some Ilymenoptera. 45 



hausting it of air, and suction is out of the question; and after, by 

 capillaiy attraction, the tluid had ascended to the upper end of the 

 "sort of tube," it still has a little distance to ascend to the labrum 

 without assistance of any kind, because the upi)er or hinder end 

 of the niaxillne does not quite extend as far back as the labrum. This 

 phrase, "sort of tube," itself indicates that Eeaumer, and those who 

 use it after him, had no very definite idea of the thing or its mode of 

 action. It is not thus that one writes of a thing that he has seen and 

 examined and understood; but with vague ideas that a thing is or 

 must be something like a tube, one may write of it as a " sort of tube." 

 Again, in i)robing the depth of many flowers (since bees do not habitu- 

 ally find honey ready made on pieces of glass), a bee would find it im- 

 possible to bend its tongue as figured b3' Reaumer, and would be 

 compelled to extend its tongue to its full extent, and then, as every 

 one who has examined a bee's tongue has seen, and as Reaumer 

 himself tells us, not only the maxilla? palpi and paraglossa? stand out 

 from it, but the very hairs themselves do so. Where is the '' sort of 

 tube" formed by these organs then ? Reaumer further tested the mode 

 of feeding by holding a bee in his fingers whilst he placed a drop (it 

 could not have been much larger than a pin-point) of honey on its tongue 

 near the tip wdien he found that it spread upwards. A more inconclu- 

 sive experiment he could hardly have tried, as we shall conclude when 

 we consider the diflticulty of making an accurate observation with a 

 lens under the circumstances, the minute size of the drop, and the 

 fact that it must, if large enough to spread at all, spread more or less 

 in every direction. But Reaumer does not tell us that he ever found 

 a particle of nectar on the outside of the tongue of a bee just taken 

 from a flower. Has Siwy one else '? It seems, to me at least, that if 

 the nectar was taken in this way the tongue would be constantly 

 smeared with it, and the hairs agglutiuatcd to its surface. All of 

 Rcaumer's experiments on this matter were made on bees in most 

 unnatural conditions, and in the cases where he and others have ob- 

 served bees lapping, or more properl}' toping, the surfaces of flowers 

 large enough to admit of thi.s movement of the tongue, is it not 

 probable that they were gathering pollen instead of nectar? But the 

 la])ping theory, and the Iheor}' which for want of a better name I shall 

 call the "sort of tube" theory, if they explain satisfactorily the mode 

 in w-hich the honey bee and allied species gather nectar fail utterly 

 when a}:^plied to the Acutilingiies, Andrena, Augochlora, Halictus, etc. 

 In these the tongue proper — the hairy tongue — is very short, while 

 behind it is a long, smooth mentum, with the basal joints of the 

 maxilhie closing tightly on it — there is no tube, nor " sort of tube," 

 there. If the fluid ascends externally, it must after leaving the tongue 

 ascend without the aid of lap])ing, or of capillary attraction, or any 



