534 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO I67O. 



In a garden near a willow, I found where they got their leaves for their car- 

 tridges ; which are not willow but rose leaves. I will now proceed no further. 



At my coming home I found the long expected cartridges, and some of 

 the bees hatched; so that now we want nq^thing to complete their history. I 

 will trouble you only with those particulars which are not mentioned in Dr. 

 King's paper, to whom we owe the knowledge of their productions, and whose 

 observations concerning them our own experience has since confirmed. Mr. 

 Snell, an ingenious gentleman, brought some of them to the wells at Astrop, 

 who directing me to the place where he got them, I found plenty in the trunk 

 of a dead willow. Beginning to unfold some of them, Mr. Ray immediately 

 judged them to be made up of pieces of rose leaves, and remembered that in 

 this very spring a friend of his, Mr. Francis Jessop, brought him a rose leaf, out 

 of which he saw a bee bite such a piece, and fly away with it in her mouth. 

 Whereupon searching the rose trees thereabout, we found a great many leaves, 

 with such pieces bitten out of them as these cartridges are made of. The 

 cuniculi or holes never cross the grain of the wood, excepting where the bee 

 comes in, and where they open one into another. From the place of entrance, 

 they are wrought both upwards and downwards; so that sometimes the bee- 

 maggot lies under her food, and sometimes above it. That end of the car- 

 tridge which is next the entrance, is always a little concave; the other, which is 

 furthest from the entrance, a little convex, and is received into the concave of 

 the next beyond it. The sides of the cartridges are made up of oblong pieces 

 of leaves, and pasted together; the ends, of round ones: And wherever they 

 do not lie close one to another, the intermediate space is filled up with a multi- 

 tude of these little round pieces, laid one upon another. 



The cartridges contain a pap or batter, of the consistence of a jelly, or some- 

 thing thicker; of a middle colour between syrup of violets and conserve of red 

 roses; of an acid taste, and unpleasant smell. In each of these, at the concave 

 end, there lies one bee-maggot, which feeds upon the before-mentioned matter, 

 till it grows to its full largeness, and then makes and incloses herself in a theca 

 or husk, of a dark red colour, and oval figure; in which she is changed into a 

 bee. The remainder of her food you may find dried into powder at the convex 

 end; and her excrements at the concave without the theca. 



The bees I found in your box (which are the only ones I have yet seen) were 

 of a shorter and thicker shape than the common honey-bee, more hairy, &c. 

 But the surest mark to distinguish them is, that the forcipes or teeth of these 

 are larger, broader, and stronger ; in shape like those of a wasp or hornet ; from 

 which she also sufficiently differs in having a tongue like a bee. 



They made their way out along the channel through all the intermediate car- 



