BEES AM) TIlEIl! COUNTERFEITS. 15 



(liu'or, tilmy cells containing liquid honey having been found 

 in its nest, which has been discovered formed of tubes in the 

 main stem of the bramble ; and that indefatigable entomolo- 

 gical observer, Mr. F. Smith, the well-known author of the 

 British Museum Catalogue of Hymenoptera, having watched 

 a specimen of the genus Sphecodes of the sub-family Acnti- 

 liiufxes while in the act of forming its burroAv, discovered that 

 it was a pollen producer, although without the usual organs 

 for carrying the pollen. 



" Some of the exotic bees," says Mr. Noel Humphreys, 

 "are almost as richly coloured as the more gaudy butterfly 

 tribe, and at the same time are of such conspicuous size as 

 must render them very remarkable objects, winging their 

 I'apid and always musical passage among the exuberant vege- 

 tation of the tropics. A thoughtful spectator seeing for the 

 first time in their native wilds these gigantic and magnifi- 

 cently tinted bees, robbing the nectaries of tropic flowers of 

 sweets whose mere perfume seems almost too delicious, could 

 scarcely forbear picturing to himself the produce of unknown 

 kinds of honey, of a luscious sweetness and exquisite flavour, 

 as yet undreamed of. If (he might reflect) those mean little 

 plants of wild thyme, trailing their humble stems among the 

 scanty herbage of our bleak northern hills, can yield delicious 

 honey to that poor little brown gatherer, the old hive-bee, 

 what may one naturally expect to be the result of honey- 

 gathering by such a noble race of bees as these of the tropics, 

 and with such exquisite flowers to gather from ! Such might 

 easily be conceived to' be the exclamation of an observer of 

 the flight of bees among the gorgeous plants in one of the 

 natural gardens of some intertropical valley ; and he would 

 think of those bees mentioned by Amer which make natural 

 hives of the cavities of rocks, laying up honey in large 

 l)ouches, or cells, of the size of a pigeon's ogg, and which, 

 being dark coloured, and hanging to the sides of the hive in 

 clusters, look like bunches of delicious grapes, containing, in 

 fact, a juice far more sweet. He might think also of what 

 Clavigero, the Spanish historian of Mexico, says of a bee, 

 evidently' of a nearly allied species, which abounds in Yucatan, 



