182 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



body of the bee is covered with farina, with the brushes 

 of its legs, especially of the hind ones, it wipes it oif : 

 not, as we do with our dusty clothes, to dissipate and 

 disperse it in the air, but to collect every particle of 

 it, and then to knead it and form it into two little 

 masses, which she places, one in each, in the baskets 

 formed by hairs ^ on her liind legs. 



Aristotle says that in each journey from the hive, 

 bees attend only one species of flower'' ; Reaumur, 

 however, seems to think that they fly indiscriminately 

 from one to another : but Mr. Dobbs in the Philoso' 

 phical Transactions", and Butler before him, asserts 

 that he has frequently followed a bee engaged in col- 

 lecting pollen, &c. and invariably observed that it con- 

 tinued collecting from the same kind of flowers with 

 "which it first began ; passing over other species, how- 

 ever numerous, even though the flower it first selected 

 Was scarcer than others. His observations, he thinks, 

 are confirmed — and the idea seems not unreasonable — 

 by the uniform colour of the pellets of pollen, and their 

 different size. Reaumur himself tells us that the bees 

 enter the hive, some with yellow pellets, others with 

 red ones, others again with whitish ones, and that some- 

 times they are even green : upon wliich he observes, 

 that this arises from their being collected from parti- 

 cular flowers, the pollen of whose anthers is of those 

 colours'*. Sprengel, as before intimated', has made an 

 observation similar to that of Dobbs. It seems not im- 

 probable that the reason why the bee visits the same 



» Kirby, 3Ionogr.Jp.Jngl. i. t.l2. **. e.l. tieut. f. 19. a.b. 

 " Hht. Anim. \. ix. c.40. " xlvi. 5.'i6. 



" ubi supra, m\. ' Vol. I. 2d Ed. ^i93. 



