INFLUENCE OF TEMPERATURE 291 



connection with such fortunately placed colonies that 

 the critical advances in organisation were probably 

 made. It is, therefore, interesting to observe what 

 result adverse conditions exert on a bee raised to the 

 middle social condition of the Bombus-cl&ss, and the 

 increased amount of attention to Arctic animals allows 

 us to do this. We now know, thanks to the twenty 

 years' observation of Dr. Schneider, that in some 

 species of Arctic bumble-bees workers do not occur, 

 in others they are very rare. These bees, therefore, 

 have returned to the solitary mode of life, and in 

 order to utilise the short summer they work by the 

 midnight as well as by the midday sun. Conversely 

 it is found that in Corsica there are indications of the 

 favouring influence of the milder winter. For there, 

 even in spring, some of the bumble-bees are males 

 and some females, and the colonies are not so nearly 

 decimated as in our own climate. 



How this last enemy, death, has been prevented 

 from devastating bee-colonies is the problem, the 

 solution of which has given the hive-bee its high place 

 and importance above all other bees. We do not 

 know with certainty how this critical improvement 

 was effected, since, in its several forms, the hive-bee 

 is now domesticated or semi-domesticated all the 

 world over, and, as is so frequently the case in the 

 past history of cultivated creatures and plants, we 

 have lost the wild stock, or stock from which it sprang. 

 Nevertheless, some indications remain, and these, as we 

 should expect, are for the most part exhibited by bees 



