332 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



manner she buzzed round some of the foxgloves, but without 

 alighting or slackening speed, to alight, then made a wide 

 circuit or two, high up, and, at last, flew right into the fir forest 

 surrounding these open spaces, which I have never before, if I 

 remember, seen a bee here do. 



Thus it seems clear that, with the coming on of this drowsi- 

 ness, the psychology of the bee is affected, and though we may 

 not exactly see why, yet it is not inconceivable that such mental 

 disturbal may produce a reversion to past ancestral habits, in 

 which category entering the cup of the foxglove, in order to 

 extract the nectar, would fall, in the case of a bee that was not 

 accustomed to do this, if we suppose that such entry was the 

 primitive method adopted, and that the others of probing the 

 tube from without, or visiting those flowers only that had shed 

 their corollas, were deviations from it, subsequently arising. In 

 illness, and also in old age, the mind is often filled with the 

 memories of childhood, and though the reversion here is only to 

 one's past, still it is a reversion, and may be governed by the 

 same laws as obtain in the other. Drowning, again, is appa- 

 rently attended by the same phenomenon. I am assuming, of 

 course, that the bee's individual habits have always been the 

 same. Otherwise, the analogy offered by the above cases would 

 be much closer, if not exact. 



As the bees do not either bite through the neck of the fox- 

 glove with their mandibles, or pierce it with their proboscis, to 

 what agency are the holes which they find ready-made there 

 attributable ? On several occasions I had noticed a small Longi- 

 corn, or Longicorn-like beetle, in this situation, and I thought, 

 though I could not be quite sure, that one of these was biting at 

 the neck of the foxglove, inside which he was. Longicorns, at 

 any rate, are, I believe, vegetarians, and as this one seems to 

 live largely on the foxglove, it is probable that it does so in a 

 double sense. Though small, this beetle is not so very small — 

 as large, perhaps, though the shape is different, as the house-fly 

 and there is at least one larger species whose habits appear to 

 be the same. Through the lens, the mandibles of both look 

 very well adapted for making these little holes in the walls of 

 flowers. They are long and sharply pointed, finely though 



