PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY THE W. T FALCONER MANPG CO. 



VOL. V. 



f\PRIL 1895. 



NO. 4. 



Giant Bees in India : 



APIS DORSATA. 



By Frauk Benton. 



Two persons have given adverse 

 opinions concerning Apis dorsata, to 

 which the public have been disposed 

 to attach some importance, yet which 

 I believe are open to severe criticism. 



One of these is the lamented Prof. 

 Frank Cheshire, whose work in the 

 wide field of scientific apiculture is, 

 in the main, worthy of almost unlim- 

 ited praise, but who seems to me to 

 have ventured too far, in this instance, 

 with his theorizing. Without ever 

 having seen a live bee of this species 

 he proceeds in about four pages of his 

 book to reason on mechanical, physi- 

 ological, botanical and economic 

 grounds, that larger bees could be of 

 no use to us, and says besides that, 

 " Apis dorsata is known to be a useless 

 savage." 



I cannot notice in full here all of 

 the points he tries to make, though in 

 the proper place it is my intention to 

 do so some time in the future. But 

 having, myself, seen and worked with 

 bees of the species Apis dorsata in 

 their native land, placed them in 

 frame hives and manipulated these 

 colonies — even transpo/ted them to a 



distant country with me, I am thor- 

 oughly of the opinion that Mr. Che- 

 shire knew nothing of Apis dorsata, 

 nor could he by any sort of reasoning 

 arrive at any opinion as to what they 

 would do when transported to Eng- 

 land or to this country. One of his 

 points I wish however to refer to here. 

 He says, when arguing from a botan- 

 ical standpoint against Apis dorsata : 

 "The build of every floweret is adapt- 

 ed to that of its fertiliser, and, could 

 we suddenly increase the dimensions 

 of our hive-bees, we should throw 

 them out of harmony with the floral 

 world around them, decrease their 

 utility by reducing the number of 

 plants they could fertilise, and dimin- 

 ish equally their value as honey-gath- 

 erei'S." To the fact of this interde- 

 pendence between insects and the 

 flowers they fertilize I agree. It is 

 mutual and intimate. But had Mr. 

 Cheshire any right to assume that if, 

 by reason of increased size, our bees 

 could no longer secure the nectar 

 from certain small blossoms and at the 

 same time fertilize them, they would 

 not have added to their list of avail- 

 able plants an equal number of larger 

 flowers whose nectaries were formerly 

 inaccessible to them and to whose es- 

 sential parts their bodies by reason of 



