THE PARASITES OF THE HONEY-BEE. 199 





































The Oil-beetle, Meloé angusticollis Say (Plate 4, fig. 7, 
male, differing from the female by having the antenne as if 
twisted into a knot; Fig. 8, the active larva found on the 
body of the bee), is a large dark-blue insect found crawling 
in the grass in the vicinity of the. nests of Andrena and 
Halictus and other wild bees in May, and again in August 
and September. The eggs are laid in a mass covered with 
earth at the root of some plant. During April and early in 
May, when the willows are in blossom, we have found the 
young recently hatched larve in considerable abundance 
creeping briskly over the bees, or with their heads plunged 
between the segments of the body, greedily sucking in the 
juices of their host. Those that we saw occurred on the 
humble-bee, Halictus and Andrena, and various flies (Syr- 
phus and Muscidæ), and there is no reason why they should 
not infest the honey-bee which frequent similar flowers, as 
they actually are known to do in Europe. These larve are 
probably hatched out near where the bees hybernate so as to 
creep into their bodies before they fly in the spring, as it 
would be impossible for them to crawl up a willow tree ten 
feet high or more, their feet being solely adapted for climb- 
ing over the hairy. body of the bee, which they do not leave 
until about to undergo their strange and unusual transforma- 
ns. 
In Europe, Assmuss states that on’ being brought into the 
nest by the bee, they leave the bee and devour the eggs in 
the bee-cells, and then attack the bee-bread. When full-fed 
and ready to pass through their transformations to attain 
the bee state, instead of at once assuming the pupa and 
imago state, as in the Trichodes represented above, they pass 
through a hyper-metamorphosis, as Fabre, a French naturalist, 
calls it. In other words, the changes in form which are pre- 
Paratory to assuming the pupa and imago states are here 
More marked and almost coequal with the larva and pupa 
states, so that the Meloé, instead of passing through three 
States (the egg, larva, and pupa), in reality passes through 

