70 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



(December 9th) a paper on the habits of the Brazilian 

 Meliponae and Trigonse, by M. Maurice Girard, was read 

 (although not yet published), from which it would appear 

 that one of the former group establishes its nest in the 

 interior of termitaries, living in amicable relations with a 

 species of Termes. A new species of Brazilian Trigona, 

 whereof the queen, males, and workers have been described 

 by Herr Hermann Mliller under the vernacular name of 

 T. cagafoga (' Nature,' Nos. 193 and 237), is "supposed" to 

 imitate some of the Forraicidae, in milking the larvse of 

 certain Membracidae belonging to the Homopterous genus 

 Potnia of Stal, to which, in the absence of Aphides, the ants 

 of Brazil have recourse for the purpose of imbibing the 

 saccharine fluid, which the former also emit. 



Habits of Social Hymenoptera. — Sir John Lubbock has 

 communicated to the Linnean Society, on two occasions 

 during the past year, the results of some highly interesting 

 observations made by him "On the Habits of Bees, Wasps, 

 and Ants," his experiments having for their object to test the 

 extent to which the social Hymenoptera may be enabled to 

 communicate with each other. The deductions to be drawn 

 from these experiments would seem to be of a character to 

 dissipate much of the fantasy with which this subject has 

 been invested by those writers who have attributed to such 

 communities the employment oi^^ some kind of language''^ as 

 a medium of intercommunication. But in ascribing such 

 faculties to these co-operating colonies, it may be conceived 

 that (speaking figuratively) more was never intended to be 

 implied than the habitual employment of certain symbols for 

 intelligible purposes ; and that none of these writers ever 

 intended to assume that any of these interesting races could 

 exercise the power of describing localities or of communi- 

 cating facts, without acting as pioneers to their companions, 

 and (as Hliber says) bringing others to such localities. As 

 an instance of this nature, 1 may mention a circumstance in 

 which similar evidences were elicited. APolistes nest having 

 been brought to me full of feeding larvae, with a single speci- 

 men of the imago brood, I placed this nest, together with its 

 solitary occupant, outside a window, but within the exterior 

 Venetian blinds corresponding with those of three floors of 

 several consecutive houses, covering the nest at first with a 



