154 HYMENOPTEKA. 



nursing bees, and provided with food adapted to their 

 condition. Six or seven days after their birth they dis- 

 pose themselves to undergo their metamorphosis. Shut 

 up in their cells by their nurses, who close the opening 

 with a lid of wax, they line the walls of their narrow 

 dwelling with a tapestry of silk, in which they spin a 

 cocoon, become nymphs, and after about twelve days of 

 seclusion, issue forth as working bees all ready taught, by 

 their Divine instructor, how, at once, to set about their 

 various avocations. The eggs from which the males are 

 produced, are not laid till two months later, and shortly 

 afterwards those which give birth to females are depo- 

 sited. 



The Humble Bees (Bombus) are well known to every 

 schoolboy. Many of them dwell under ground, or in 



FIG. 114. HUMBLE BEES; MALE, FEMALE, AND WORKER. 



moss-covered nests, where they live together in colonies 

 varying from 60 to 200 or 300 in number, 



Hugh Miller thus shortly describes the principal species 

 of humble bees : " When a boy at Cromarty," says 

 that elegant writer, " the wild honey-bees in their several 

 species had peculiar charms for us. There were the 

 buff-coloured carders, that erected over their honey-jars 

 domes of moss ; the lapidary, red-tipped bees, that built 

 amidst the recesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone 

 walls, and were so invincibly brave in defending their 

 homesteads, that they never gave up the quarrel till they 

 died ; and above all, the yellow-zoned humble-bees, that 

 lodged deep in the ground, along the dry sides of the 

 grassy bank, and were usually wealthier in honey than 

 their congeners, and existed in large communities. But 

 the herd-boy of the parish, and the foxes of its woods and 

 brakes, shared in my interest in the wild honey-bees, and, 

 in the pursuit of something else than knowledge, were 

 ruthless robbers of their nests." 



