Wasps, Bees, and Ants 



5 11 



While bumblebees and honey-bees are the everywhere common, con- 

 spicuous, and familiar representatives of the great superfamily of bees, the 

 Apoidea, they include but a fraction of the nearly one thousand different 

 kinds of bees so far recorded as occurring in this country. Indeed, all of 

 our social honey-bees, although variously called German, Italian, Carniolans, 

 etc., belong to a single species, and that not a native but an imported one. 

 Of the bumblebees a few more than fifty native species are known. Besides 

 the hive-bee and the bumblebee, then, there are nearly a thousand other bees 

 in the American fauna to be taken into account. As among the wasps, 

 there are parasitic, guest, solitary, and social kinds of bees; and as among 

 the solitary wasps there are diggers, miners, carpenters, and masons, so 

 also there are miner-, carpenter-, and mason-bees. There are bees which 

 lay their eggs in the nests of other bees, so that their young feed on the stored 

 food of the hosts; there are bees which make nest-burrows in the ground, 

 others that tunnel in stems of plants and wood, others that mould clay cells, 

 others that cut leaves and line their nest bored into the pith of canes, others 

 that live in communities underground which break up each year, and finally, 

 most conspicuous among them all, there is the familiar species that lives in 

 great persistent communities in hives and hollow trees. 



All these thousand bee kinds can be conveniently and naturally primarily 

 grouped into two divisions, the short-tongued bees (Fig. 716) (those with 

 a short, broad, flattened, spoon-like tongue) 

 and the long-tongued bees (Fig. 717) (those with 

 a slender, elongate, subcylindrical flexible tongue). 

 In the older books these groups were called fami- 

 lies, namely the Andrenidae (short-tongued bees) 

 and the Apidae (long-tongued bees), but modern 

 systematists, while still recognizing the con- 

 venience of this primary grouping, classify bees 

 into a dozen families or more. For the purposes 

 of this book, however, we shall recognize a group- 

 ing on structural characters into simply two main 

 divisions, short-tongued and long-tongued, and 

 another grouping, on a basis of habit and of 

 psychologic development, into three general groups, 

 namely, solitary bees, gregarious bees, and com- 

 munal bees. 



The structural characters in which all bees 

 agree among themselves and differ from the other Hymenoptera are the pos- 

 session of branched or feathery hairs on the head and thorax and of swollen 

 or expanded and flattened tarsal segments : the pronotum does not extend 

 back to the tegulae of the wings as is the case with the Sphecoid wasps, 



FIG. 716. Mouth-parts of a 

 short-tongued bee, Prosopis 

 pubescens. Note short, 

 broad, flap - like tongue 

 (glossa of labium). (After 

 Sharp; much enlarged.) 



