THE HONEY BEE. 7 



with hairs, which exclude any dust or foreign particles from 

 entering. Its sub-class is the true insects or Hexapoda (mean- 

 ing six feet). This sub-class is characterised by their having 

 three divisions to the body — head, thorax, and abdomen. The 

 order of the honey-bee is Hy7nenoptera, or membranous wings, 

 of which the bee has four. The members of this order, with 

 few exceptions, are characterised by their providing and caring 

 for their young, which at first are quite helpless. Its family is 

 called ApidcB ; the insects of this family all feed their young upon 

 pollen, or honey and pollen, and all of this family have the first 

 joint, or tarsus, of the two posterior legs widened, which, together 

 with a broad tibia hollowed out, and in the genus Apis fringed 

 with stiff hairs, form a receptacle in which they carry pollen and 

 propolis to their hives. This receptaclfi is called by bee-keepers 

 the pollen basket. The honey bee belongs to this latter genua 

 Apis, which is again sub-divided into a number of varieties. 



14. Natural Habitat. — The honey bee, in England, has 

 been so long associated with the straw skep that old-fashioned 

 bee-keepers have long ago given up the idea as to any other 

 form of outward architecture, and sf^em to be quite assured in 

 their own mind that straw is, and always has been, the material 

 from which its home has been, and ought to be, constructed ; so 

 convinced are they of this, that upon the advent of wood hives 

 they dubiously shook their heads and prognosticated a com- 

 plete failure, simply because a straw hive was, according to their 

 ideas, a more natural dwelling. We are frequently astonished at 

 even advanced bee-keepers upholding this theory. Did our 

 forefathers of many generations ago make straw skeps? We 

 venture to assert that they did not, but preferred— as in many 

 uncivilised tribes of the present day — to take their honey from the 

 holes in trees, where the bee's natural home is to be found. 

 Wood, not straw, is the bee's choice of outside architecture. We 

 make our bar frame hives of wood. It is not our wish to assert 

 that in all cases this desire on the part of the bees to build 

 their combs in hollow trees is strictly adhered to ; but will simply 

 say that any hollow space, be it in straw, wood, stone, brick, or 

 any other material that will keep out the rain is the bee's 

 natural habitat. Of course, straw would be, unless specially 

 fashioned by man, the most unlikely material in which we should 

 expect to find a colony of bees. There are a few varieties of the 

 genus Apis who construct their combs without any covering, 

 under the limbs of trees, notably Apis dorsata, of India and 

 Ceylon. Even in our own country, an exceptional case here and 

 there has occurred of such proceedings on the part of a swarm 

 of ordinary English bees, but successful wintering has never been 

 accomplished under such circumstances. The tribes along a 

 portion of the Congo, in Central Africa, keep quantities of bees 

 in rush baskets, suspended upon the branches of trees, and 



