INDIRECT INJURIES CAUSED BY INSECTS. 165 



frequently take possession of a hive, having either 

 destroyed or driven away its inhabitants, and consume 

 all the honey it contains. Nay there are certain idlers 

 of their own species, called by apiarists corsair-bees, 

 which plunder the hives of the industrious. — From the 

 curious account which Latreille has given us o^ Phi- 

 hinthus apivorus, a wasp-like insect, it appears that great 

 havoc is made by it of the unsuspecting workers, which 

 it seizes while intent upon their daily labours, and car- 

 ries off to feed its young ^. Another insect, which one 

 would not have suspected of marauding propensities, 

 must here be introduced. Kuhn informs us, that long 

 ago (in 1799) some monks who kept bees, observing 

 that they made an unusual noise, lifted up the hive, 

 when an animal flew out, which to their great surprise 

 no doubt, for they at first took it for a bat, proved to be 

 the death's-head hawk-moth (Sphinx Atropos, L.), al- 

 ready celebrated as the innocent cause of alarm''; and 

 he remembers that several, some years before, had been 

 found dead in the bee-houses^. M. Huber, also, in 

 1804 discovered that it had made its way into his hives 

 and those of his vicinity, and had robbed them of their 

 honey. In Africa we are told it has the same propen- 

 sity; which the Hottentots observing, in order to mo- 

 nopolize the honey of the wild bees, have persuaded the 

 colonists that it inflicts a mortal wound*'. This moth 

 has the faculty of emitting a remarkable sound, which 

 he supposes may produce an eff'ect upon the bees of a 

 hive somewhat similar to that caused by the voice of 



° Latreille, Hht. des Fotmnis, 307-20. " See above, p, 34, 



" Naturforscher Stk. xvi. 74. 



'' Quoted from Campbell's Travels in South Jfrica,\n the Quarterly Re 

 t'icK for July 1815. 315. 



