NATURAL HISTORY STUDIES 



burrow, and we have often seen feathers as well as 

 leaves being taken underground. 



Among insects, we find an inclined plane of storing 

 activities that leads up to the climax illustrated by 

 hive-bees and by some of the ants. Many visitors 

 to the Mediterranean region have admired the 

 industry of the scarabees, who roll marble-sized balls 

 of dung to their holes, and there gnaw at them 

 continuously till all is consumed. In this there is, 

 indeed, only the first stage of storing, but the late 

 M. Henri Fabre described in his inimitable way how 

 the mother scarabee moulds a pear-shaped mass and 

 lays at the narrow end an egg which occupies a 

 special hatching chamber and has beside it a special 

 first meal for the emerging grub ! Here it is not 

 difficult to imagine the step from collecting for self 

 to collecting for others, and it is interesting to know 

 that in some of the dung-beetles the mother lives 

 on to see her family hatch out, which is very rarely 

 the case among the higher insects that store food 

 around their laid eggs. 



Among the solitary bees the mother makes a 

 store for the brood which she never survives to see ; 

 among humble-bees the store is begun by the 

 mother but continued by her worker-children, and 

 in some kinds at least a part of the society survives 

 the winter : in some tropical bees there are per- 

 manent societies but imperfect combs ; in the hive- 

 bees there are permanent societies and perfect combs. 

 The elaborate storing of hive-bees, carried to such 

 perfection under man's care, is, to begin with, con- 

 neted with surviving the winter i.e. with per- 



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