336 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



been made by themselves.* This, of course, would not exclude 

 the agency of a previous bee, but why should one individual 

 depend on another for what it could equally well do itself? 

 Moreover, the biting of a hole, by a bee, in any flower that it can 

 reach by entry, would appear to be a very doubtful method of 

 saving time. A previously perforated foxglove would, however, 

 enable it to save trouble, and in this we probably have the real 

 motive of action. By counting the number of foxglove flowers 

 searched, in a given time, by representatives of each method, it 

 would be possible, perhaps, to find out whether this saving of 

 trouble is synonymous with saving of time. Should it, however, 

 appear that the non-foxglove-entering bees worked less quickly 

 than the others, this would not quite settle the question, since 

 the factors of duration of labour and amount of rest required 

 would still remain to be considered. To wedge itself up one 

 narrow tube, after another, must certainly be greater labour for a 

 bee than flight between flower and flower ; greater labour must 

 require a greater amount of relaxation from it, and I have seen 

 Humble-Bees, which were not in a lethargic condition, sitting, 

 for some while, motionless, as though resting. 



* As bearing on this question, I may mention that various Humble-Bees 

 that I confined inside foxgloves, by tying up the mouth with cotton, remained 

 prisoners, for a long time, before they began to bite the corollas in order to 

 force their way out, which was such a labour to them that some on emerg- 

 ing lay, for a time, motionless, as if exhausted. This may not prove that 

 it is not their custom to bite through foxgloves, from without, but it does 

 not favour that view. There would, however, be nothing extraordinary in 

 the fact of bees that once bit their way into foxgloves having now become 

 dependent on the work of other insects, in this respect. Ants, now fed by 

 slave ants, once fed themselves, and can still do so to some extent, and (if I 

 am not mistaken) in differing degrees. In this connection the facts here 

 recorded become all the more interesting. 



