BEES AND THEIR ENEMIES. Ill 



their nutriment, is extremely improbable. It is far more 

 likely that instinct has taught them to be conveyed 

 elsewhere through the medium of the bee, as they might 

 also be by attaching themselves to any other volatile 

 insect, and that upon arriving at a suitable locality they 

 descend from their temporary hippogriff. We see seeds 

 thus conveyed by the agency of animals and birds to 

 suitable places, where they fall and germinate. 



Another little hexapod is occasionally found upon 

 them : this is intensely black, and like the former, very 

 active : these I never could rear, nor did they ever seem 

 to enlarge, and they speedily died. I have found them 

 in profusion also within the flowers of syngenesious or 

 composite plants, especially of the dandelion in the 

 spring. 



But their most remarkable personal parasites consist 

 of some very extraordinary insects, so anomalous in 

 their structure as to have required the construction of 

 an order for their reception, the Order Strepsiptera, or 

 " twisted-winged," thus named from the twist taken by 

 their anterior wings or wing-cases. Their natural history 

 is but imperfectly known, and I believe the males have 

 not yet been discovered. Their larva lives within the 

 bee, and feeds on its viscera by absorption, being at- 

 tached within by a sort of umbilical cord. It presently 

 consumes the viscera, and renders the bee abortive, by 

 destroying its ovaries, for it is usually upon female bees 

 that it is found. When full fed it forms a case within 

 which it changes into the pupa and imago, the head of 

 which case protrudes between the scales of one of the 

 dorsal segments of the abdomen. How it becomes depo- 

 sited within the bee or the bee's larva remains a mystery, 

 although many hypotheses have been hazarded to account 



