GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 27 
grains, from returning to the honey-sack. Cheshire affirms 
that this stomach-mouth, which protrudes into the honey- 
sack, acts as a sort of sieve, and strains the honey from the 
grains of pollen floating in it, appropriating them for di- 
gestion, and allowing the honey to flow back into the sack. 
The bee could thus, at will, ‘‘ eat or drink from the mixed 
diet she carries.’’ 
64. According to Schonfeld, (Iilustrierte Bienenzeitung) 
the chyle, or milky food which is used to feed the young lar- 
vee,—and which we have shown to be, most probably, the 
product of the upper pair of glands (39-40),—would be 
produced from the digesting-stomach, which he and others 
call chyle-stomach. Although we are not competent in the 
matter, we would remark that the so-called chyle-stomach 
produces chyme, or digested food, from which the chyle, or 
nourishing constituent, is absorbed by the cell-lining of the 
stomach and of the intestines, and finally converted into 
blood. We do not see how this chyle, could be thickened and 
regurgitated by the stomach to be returned to the mouth. 
65. In mammals, the chyliferous vessels do not exist in 
the stomach, but in the intestine, the function of the stom- 
ach being only to digest the food by changing it into chyme, 
from which the chyle is afterwards separated, for the use of 
the body. i 
66. Again, in the mammals, the glands which produce 
milk are composed of small clusters of acint, which take 
their secretions from the blood and empty them into vessels 
terminating at the surface of the breast. The action of the 
upper gland (39-40), in the bee, is exactly similar to 
the action of those lacteal glands, and the fact that this 
gland is absent in the queen and in the drone is, to us, pos- 
itive evidence that the chylous or lacteal food (given the 
larve) is produced by these glands alone, and not by the 
direct action of the digesting-stomach. 
67. The food arriving in the stomach is mixed with the 
