GENERAL HISTORY OP BEES. 57 



onwards from the merely burrowing-bee to the more 

 complicated processes of the masons, carpenters, and 

 upholsterers, — all solitary insects, and working each in- 

 dividually and separately to the accomplishment of its 

 object. But we may certainly inquire where we shall 

 intercalate the sagacity of the cuckoo-bees. A vast 

 bound is immediately made from the artisan bees to 

 the social bees with three sexes, which, as first shown in 

 the humble-bee, works in small and rude communities, 

 with dwellings of irregular construction. The next and 

 most perfect grade is the metropolitan polity, accom- 

 plished architecture, laborious parsimony, indomitable 

 perseverance, and well- organized subordination of the 

 involuntary friend of man, the domestic bee. This in- 

 sect has furnished Scriptural figures of exquisite sweet- 

 ness, poetry with pleasing metaphors, morality with 

 aphorisms, and the most elegant of the Latin poets with 

 the subject of the supremest of his perfect Georgics. 



That bees feel pain may be assumed from the evidence 

 we have of their feeling pleasure, although instances are 

 on record of insects surviving for months impaled ; and 

 they lose a limb, or even an antenna, without evincing 

 much suffering, and I have seen a humble-bee crawling 

 along on the ground with its abdomen entirely torn 

 away. 



In speaking of the antennse above, as possibly the 

 organs of hearing, I would wish to add, that they evi- 

 dently possess some complex function, of which, not 

 possessing any analogy, we cannot certainly conceive any 

 notion. They are observed to be used as instruments 

 of touch, and that too of the nicest discrimination. They 

 seem to be extremely sensitive to the vibrations of sound 

 and the undulations of air, and keenly appreciative of 



