180 THE HUMBLE-BEE VIII 
Coat uneven and rather long. 
Head very long as in the queen, the cheeks being rather 
more than half as long as the eyes. 
Antenne long, length of flagellum 64 mm. 
Armature like that of B. ruderatus. 
A male sent me from Cargill in Perthshire is entirely black, 
with the exception of a few scattered hairs on the 5th and 6th 
segments. 
B. hortorum is one of the commonest and most 
widely distributed of the British species, and occurs, 
though not very plentifully, in Orkney. The queens 
begin to appear and to make their nests rather early 
in the season. In the Dover district most of the 
nests are started about the middle of May, but a few 
queens may be seen working up to the end of June, 
and occasionally later. On July 17, 1911, I took a 
nest in which the first batch of workers had not 
emerged, but they began coming out two days 
later. The queen was rather small but very active, 
and showed no signs of wear or exposure, which 
suggested that she might have been reared the 
same season. The males are most abundant in 
July, but continue appearing in small numbers till 
October. 
The nests are not very populous and seldom, | 
think, contain more than 100 workers. They are 
generally under the ground, with a short tunnel. I 
once found a queen occupying a sparrow’s nest in a 
Virginian creeper at a height of about twenty feet 
from the ground on the wall of a house; the nest 
consisted of soft hay and feathers, and under the 
comb there was an addled sparrow’s egg. 
