148 THE KN'lOMOLOGiST. 



1. The Padotropha, or children-nurses. Sociality is the 

 general attribute oi" this group — bees, wasps, and ants. The 

 young are invariably apod. The food supplied by the 

 parents is principally the honey of flowers, and the honey- 

 dew secreted, or supposed to be secreted, by plant-lice. St. 

 Fargeau informs us that the young of wasps are fed with 

 particles of more solid food, and tliat whenever the feeder 

 appears they open and shut their mouths, like young 

 birds gapiug for a grub wheu brought by their parents. 

 This is by no means the case concerning the bee, for, though 

 fed, the feeder and the fed generally exhibit great affection 

 for one another, though perhaps a kind of cupboard-love. The 

 colony consists of three kinds of individuals — male, female, 

 and neuter. The neuters do the work of the colony : build 

 the hive, feed the young, and make themselves generally 

 useful. It may be stated that they sometimes take the 

 management of the community into their own hands; for 

 DeGecr tells us of the ants, that they have been seen to kill 

 and devour the babies : this may arise from the difficulty of 

 procuring food (or them. This same operation takes place 

 also with the hive-bee in the destruction of the drone. 

 The females and neuters are provided with stings, which 

 seem for this purpose only ; at least they are very inefficacious 

 as weapons of either defence or oflleuce. Three natural orders 

 comprising this family build those remarkable cells which 

 have excited the wonder and admiration of all ; and these 

 architectural powers are abundant sources of speculation. 

 Imaginative and florid writers have invested the subject with 

 an interest that makes it so; for the same phenomena 

 take place in hexagonal crystals, in basaltic columns, in the 

 facets of an insect's eye, and in a hundred different circum- 

 stances, in which the will or instinct, or contrivance or 

 foresight, of the substance cannot possibly have been brought 

 into play. It is desirable that writers on Natural History 

 should direct their flow of glowing sentences to the wonders 

 thickly scattered around them, and which are unmistakable, 

 rather than create wonders out of the most commonplace 

 occurrences which can possibly attract the notice of the 

 uninitiated. The fact ol" a chicken being hatched by the 

 simple process of incubation is far more wonderl'ul than that 

 ordinary caterpillars should be arrayed as moths. The 

 latter fact is always noticed as remarkable, while the former 

 invariably remains unnoticed. In this order the hexagonal 

 cell is of frequent recurrence; but we must not lay too much 



