280 AUSTRALIAN TEE LORE AND LEE CULTURE. 



ral fertilisation. It is only the most highly developed bees (humble 

 bees and honey bees) that are furnished with apparatus suitable 

 for collecting and carrying pollen from flowers of all forms or 

 designs. Mason bees and leaf cutters (Osmia and Megarliile) have 

 the ventral surface of the abdomen furnished with long stiff re- 

 troverted hairs. These hairs by pointing the "wrong" way brush 

 the pollen from the anthers as the insects pass in and out of the 

 bloom. Grains of pollen become entangled among them, and by 

 this means they are transported elsewhere ; the hairs on the 

 abdomen of such insects are beautifully adapted for the fertilisa- 

 tion of flowers having a broad and flat corolla, and the reproductive 

 organs being protuberant or conspicuous. If the female organ be 

 hidden low down in the long narrow tube that some blossoms pos- 

 sess, such a>s clover, etc., they are utterly incapable of j^erforming 

 the uniting ceremony required to produce a fertile seed. 



If the hinder legs of one of the hairy bees, a young one es- 

 pecially, because they are more furry than the older ones, be closely 

 examined when returning home, it will be noted that they are 

 thickly bespangled with grains of pollen, to be afterwai'ds trans- 

 ferred to the pollen baskets; it is these stray grains of pollen 

 •attached to the hairs that are utilised in pollinating the receptive 

 ■organs of blossoms. The hairs on the hinder fcgs of one of the 

 humble bees (liomhuH terrestrin), the arrangement of the pollen- 

 gathering hairs, are carried out with greater perfection, but the 

 hairs are distributed in the same regular manner as in the hairy 

 bee already referred to. In the ordinary ho)iev bee {Apis inellifiai), 

 the pollen-collecting hairs are much better adapted to their de- 

 signed use than is the case with the two former. The hairs on 

 the tarsus of the legs are arranged, not in the irregular way as is 

 the case in that of the humble bee, but in eight or nine regular 

 rows. This regularity of the arrangement of the hairs of the pollen- 

 brush enables our domesticated bee to brush the grains of pollen 

 from the anthers far more effectively than is the case with any 

 member of the whole species. Whilst she is at work on the flowers, 

 and also in mid-air, she is constantly transferring those grains to 

 the pollen baskets, but all are not stored therein ; som>e escape, 

 and it is these escapees that do the work of fertilisation. 



I think I have poined out clearly that there is no insect so 

 highly developed for carrying the imperatively essential pollen 

 from flower to flower as the hive-bees. Their intelligence, their 

 energy, their social habits, and the ease with which they are kept 

 under control stamp them at once as no mean allv to the tiller of 



