490 HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 



New Observations on Bees, in which this subject is 

 for the first time elucidated, will enable me to gratify 

 your curiosity. 



But in the first place you must be told of an impor- 

 tant and unlooked-for discovery of this unrivalled de- 

 tector of the hidden mysteries of nature — that the 

 workers or neuters, as they are called, of a hive, con- 

 sist of two descriptions of individuals, one of which 

 he calls abeillcs noitrrices or petites abeilles, the other 

 abeilles cirieres: — The former, or nurse-bees^ are smaller 

 than the latter ; their stomach is not capable of such 

 distention ; and their office is to build the combs and 

 cells after the foundation has been laid by the cirieres; 

 to collect honey; and to feed the larvae. The abeilles 

 cirieres are the makers of wax, which substance Huber 

 has noAv indisputably ascertained to be secreted, as 

 John Hunter long ago suspected, beneath the ventral 

 segments, from between Avhich it is taken by the bees 

 when wanted, in the form of thin scales. The appa- 

 ratus in which the wax is secreted consists of four pair 

 of membranous bags or wax-pockets situated at the 

 base of each intermediate segment, one on each side, 

 which can only be seen by pressing the abdomen so as 

 to lengthen it, being usually concealed by the over- 

 lapping of the preceding segments. It should be ob- 

 served that this discovery was nearly made by our coun- 

 tryman Thorley, who in his Female Monarchy (1744) 

 says that he has taken bees with six pieces of wax 

 within the plaits of the abdomen, three on each side. 

 In these pockets the wax is secreted by some unknown 

 process from the food taken into the stomach, which in 

 the wax-making bees is much larger than in the nurse- 



