THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 69 
enterprise by apprehensions of incompetency; or who, 
having done so, have not known how to turn the resources of 
this vicarious industry to the best account. ‘The British 
Bee Journal and Bee-keeper’s Adviser,’ published monthly, 
and now far advanced in its second volume, affords a useful 
medium of intercommunication upon this subject. 
Economy of White Ants.—Two interesting communications 
from Herr Fritz Miiller to Mr. Darwin have appeared in 
‘Nature’ (Nos. 225 and 237), in the former of which the 
writer, treating of the natural history of the Brazilian 
Termites, states that he has come to the same conclusion as 
Mr. Bates with respect to the neuters,—namely, that these 
are not sterile females, but modified larve, which undergo no 
further metamorphosis ; that, in some species of Calotermes 
the male soldiers may even externally be distinguished from 
the female soldiers; and that in the company of the queen 
there always lives a king, as observed by Smeathman a 
century ago, but doubted by most subsequent writers. He 
has also recognised the existence of two forms of sexual 
individuals ; the one, consisting of zeinged males and females, 
produced in vast numbers, and leaving the termitary in 
large swarms; the other, of wingless males and females, 
which never quit the spot where they are born. A similar 
result would appear to be attained thereby, as in the case of 
the winged and wingless sexual races of the Phylloxera, 
already referred to, the former serving to disperse the race; 
the latter to continue the labours of the original colony by 
successive broods. 
Economy of Stingless Honey Bees.—Herr Fritz Miiller 
subsequently adverts to another “interesting group of social 
insects, the stingless honey-bees, Melipona and Trigona.” 
He mentions that in Melipona wax is secreted “on the 
dorsal surface of the abdomen,” instead of on the ventral, as 
in hive-bees; that the Melipone and Trigone “fill their 
cells with semi-digested food before the eggs are laid;” and 
that they close the cells “immediately after the queen has 
dropped an egg on the food ;” whereas, in the hive-bee, the 
eggs are laid in nearly empty cells, which the workers close 
with wax when the adult larve, which they have been 
feeding, are about to undergo their pupa-metamorphosis. At 
a recent meeting of the French Entomological Society 
