BEES HUMBLE AND OTHERWISE 63 



males, females and workers, each bearing its 

 own distinct livery, that have to be known, 

 whether to the ear or to the eye, before our know- 

 ledge of the humble-bees is complete. More than 

 that, our humble-bees are very variable. In each 

 sex of each species many well-marked varieties 

 have been tabulated by entomologists, and often 

 the work of one investigator has been undone by 

 another, who has found that some of his specimens 

 have been put under the wrong label. 



Here, for a striking example, comes a bee that 

 will not be found in your gallery of coloured 

 portraits of the types of all the British species. 

 It is neither yellow at one end, red at the other, 

 nor banded in the middle. It is a large and heavy 

 bee, of one uniform black all over. That is the 

 extreme melanistic type to which several of our 

 species run, and you will only be able to decide 

 its species by attention to the proportions of its 

 parts, either to the eye or through the microscope. 

 It may be one of several humble-bees ; it may be 

 no humble-bee at all. That red-tailed one too, 

 and yonder banded one, they are not humble- 

 bees unless you extend the term to cover four 

 more species. 



What is this riddle ? Any one would swear 

 that the bees just pointed out were humble-bees 

 if the others were. Still more would he swear it 

 if he saw the suspected creatures entering a humble- 

 bee nest with others apparently just like them. 

 The bees themselves are evidently deceived by 



