of the Aculeate Hi/menoptera. 53 



surpassed in the annals of entomology for accuracy or acumen, — it 

 will be readily understood that I allude to our esteemed Honorary 

 President's ' Monographia Apum Anglise ; ' a book to which (al- 

 though published thirty years ago) but very few additions could as 

 yet be made, and which is, perhaps, the most beautiful model of an 

 entomological monograph extant. And yet this work, which should 

 be the canon of practical writers, has stimulated but few to attend 

 to our bees, and the majority of collections are either very de- 

 ficient in them, or in great confusion. We must therefore seek 

 elsewhere for the true cause of this neglect, and shall perhaps find it 

 in the predominant taste of the more influential entomologists, whose 

 zeal excited a spirit of competition, which directed attention solely 

 to those orders to which they themselves had been almost exclusively 

 devoted. 



The insects I chiefly allude to in these observations, and par- 

 ticularly where I complain of the indiiFerence shown to them, are 

 comprised in a subsection of the Aculeate Hymenoptera, and are what 

 are generally called Sand-wasps. They form Latreille's second family, 

 of the second section of the order, to Avhich he has given the name 

 of Fossores, or ' burrowers,' from the circumstance of the majority of 

 the family forming little burrows in sand or earth, for the purpose 

 of depositing their eggs therein, with a sufficiency of food, consisting 

 of other insects, either in their undeveloped or their perfect state, for 

 the nurture of the larva upon the hatching of the egg. In their 

 second, or larva state, they are consequently all carnivorous, as well 

 as the true wasjDS, or Diploptera ; thus diff^ering from the Mellifera, or 

 bees, wliich supply their larvae with an admixture of honey and the 

 pollen of flowers made into a kind of i:)aste. Into these two divisions 

 of Bees and Wasps, the Aculeate Hymenojjtera are thus readily sepa- 

 rated by the very nature of the pabulum upon which the larva is 

 fed ; the wasps (I take the term in its broadest signification,) forming 

 a tribe which, although much fewer in numbers than the bees, may, 

 I think, certainly vie with them in the interesting nature of their 

 osconomy and in their personal history, for their habits are de- 

 cidedly as varied as the habits of the solitary bees ; and the social 

 bees may find competitors for attentive and interesting observation in 

 the oeconomy of the true wasps, and the family of ants, if we insti- 

 tute the comparison without reference to their uses to man. 



But the chief object of my present address (admitting, however, 

 my earnest wish to call the attention of practical entomologists to 

 this very interesting tribe,) consists in my anxiety to stop, as early 

 as possible, the diffusion of error wliich might ensue from the gene- 

 'falization of a fact discovered by a very eminent French Hymenopterist, 



