70 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
(December 9th) a paper on the habits of the Brazilian 
Meliponze and Trigone, by M. Maurice Girard, was read 
(although not yet published), from which it would appear 
that one of the former group establishes its nest in the 
interior of termitaries, living in amicable relations with a 
species of Termes. A new species of Brazilian Trigona, 
whereof the queen, males, and workers have been described 
by Herr Hermann Miiller under the vernacular name of 
T. cagafoga (‘ Nature,’ Nos. 193 and 237), is “ supposed” to 
imitate some of the Formicidae, in milking the larve of 
certain Membracidz belonging to the Homopterous genus 
Potnia of Stal, to which, in the absence of Aphides, the ants 
of Brazil have recourse for the purpose of imbibing the 
saccharine fluid, which the former also emit. 
Habits of Social Hymenoptera.—Sir John Lubbock has 
communicated to the Linnean Society, on two occasions 
during the past year, the results of some highly interesting 
observations made by him “On the Habits of Bees, Wasps, 
and Ants,” his experiments having for their object. to test the 
extent to which the social Hymenoptera may be enabled to 
communicate with each other. The deductions to be drawn 
from these experiments would seem to be of a character to 
dissipate much of the fantasy with which this subject has 
been invested by those writers who have attributed to such 
communities the employment of “ some kind of language” as 
a medium of intercommunication. But in ascribing such 
faculties to these co-operating colonies, it may be conceived 
that (speaking figuratively) more was never intended to be 
implied than the habitual employment of certain symbols for 
intelligible purposes; and that none of these writers ever 
intended to assume that any of these interesting races could 
exercise the power of describing localities or of communi- 
cating facts, without acting as pioneers to their companions, 
and (as Hiiber says) bringing others to such localities. As 
an instance of this nature, | may mention a circumstance in 
which similar evidences were elicited. A Polistes nest having 
been brought to me full of feeding larve, with a single speci- 
men of the imago brood, I placed this nest, together with its 
solitary occupant, outside a window, but within the exterior 
Venetian blinds corresponding with those of three floors of 
several consecutive houses, covering the nest at first with a 
