PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 179 



busy. Reaumur was urged to visit the hives of a gentle- 

 man, who on this account thought his bees were different 

 from the common kind a . He suspected, and it proved, 

 that the circumstance just mentioned occasioned the mis- 

 taken notion. When the body of the bee is covered with 

 farina, with the brushes of its legs, especially of the hind 

 ones, it wipes it off': not, as we do with our dusty clothes, 

 to dissipate and disperse it in the air, but to collect every 

 particle of it, and then to knead it and form it into two 

 little masses, which she places, one in each, in the baskets 

 formed by hairs 5 on her hind legs. 



Aristotle says that in each journey from the hive, bees 

 attend only one species of flower ; Reaumur, however, 

 seems to think that they fly indiscriminately from one to 

 another : but Mr. Dobbs in the Philosophical Transac- 

 tions* [ , and Butler before him, asserts that he has fre- 

 quently followed a bee engaged in collecting pollen, &c. 

 and invariably observed that it continued collecting from 

 the same kind of flowers with which it first began : passing 

 over other species, however numerous, even though the 

 flower it first selected was scarcer than others. His ob- 

 servations, he thinks, are confirmed and the idea seems 

 not unreasonable by the uniform colour of the pellets of 

 pollen, and their different size. Reaumur himself tells us 

 that the bees enter the hive, some with yellow pellets, 

 others with red ones, others again with whitish ones, and 

 that sometimes they are even green : upon which he ob- 

 serves, that this arises from their being collected from 

 particular flowers, the pollen of whose anthers is of those 



a Reaum. 295. 



b Kirby, Monogr. Ap. Angl i. t. 12. * *. e. I. neut. f. 19. a. b. 

 c Hist. Anim. 1. ix. c. 40. d xlvi. 536. 



N 2 



