NO. 2 HONEY BEE — SNODGRASS 21 



the tongue (fig. 6 B, SIO). The aperture leads into a wide, flat, tri- 

 angular chamber (F, Syr, exposed here by removal of a part of the 

 anterior wall), into the inner end of which opens the salivary duct 

 (SID). The floor of the chamber is a rigid, slightly concave plate 

 continuous at its distal angles with the inflected ends of the Hgular 

 arms of the prementum (h), which flank the salivary orifice (B). The 

 roof is flexible and elastic, and gives insertion to a pair of convergent 

 dilator muscles (fig. 7 A, i'j) arising on the anterior edges of the 

 premental sclerite. A pair of much larger muscles arising in the base 

 of the prementum (figs. 6 F, 7 A, C, 24) and inserted on the lateral 

 margins of the syringe evidently act as expulsors of the saliva by 

 flattening the dilated chamber. The salivary muscles are effective 

 only in the protracted condition of the proboscis ; as they are shown 

 in figure 7 A the muscles are slack and nonfunctional because of the 

 retraction of the ligula into the prementum. 



The salivary syringe of the bee is an elaboration of the usual 

 salivarium, which in generalized insects is a mere pocket between 

 the hypopharynx and the base of the labium. The union of the 

 hypopharynx with the labium has converted the salivary pocket into 

 a closed chamber, and the ordinary hypopharyngeal and labial muscles 

 of the salivarium become, respectively, dilators and compressors of 

 the syringe. 



The saliva, forcibly expelled from the salivary syringe, encounters 

 at once the steeply declivous base of the tongue, which lies im- 

 mediately before the salivary orifice (fig. 6B). It must, therefore, 

 be deflected in two divergent streams past the sides of the tongue 

 into the concavities of the mesal surfaces of the paraglossae, and 

 by the latter conveyed to the posterior surface of the tongue. Here, 

 presumably, the saliva enters the tongue channel and runs through 

 it to the tip of the organ, where it flows out on the under surface of 

 the apical flabellum (fig. 6G). It must be admitted that, so far as 

 known to the writer, no direct observations have been made on the 

 course of the saliva in a living bee; the relations of the structural 

 parts concerned, however, would seem to leave no other course avail- 

 able than that described above, except, perhaps, that the actual 

 conduit of the saliva through the tongue may be the groove of the 

 glossal rod instead of the larger channel that opens on the surface 

 of the tongue. The hair-fringed groove of the rod clearly must have 

 some specific function. 



It is possible that the same apparatus may be used also in the 

 process of "ripening" nectar into honey, during which process, as 

 described by Park (1925), nectar extruded from the mouth is said to 



