418 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Workers of Vespa vulgaris seen to enter a nest, 

 probably to pillage the honey, E.C.T. 

 B. lapponicus, Fab. — This is an Alpine species ; it 

 occurs high up in Switzerland and in the 

 Pyrenees, and ranges over the mountains of 

 Norway, Scotland and North Wales. In our own 

 district it has been taken upon the moors and 

 hills on the borders of Lancashire, between Roch- 

 dale and Marsden, B.C. ; and near Stalybridge, 

 B.C. and J.R.H. ; it is also sometimes found lower 

 down, on the heather and peat of Chat Moss, 

 J.R.H. 

 B. pratorum, Linn. — Our earliest Bombus, abundant 

 everywhere. A colony in a hedge sparrow's nest 

 at Chester, R.N. 

 B. terrestris, Linn. — lucorum, Sm. — virginalis, Kirb. — 

 Common everywhere. These bees have some- 

 times been observed to damage bean crops by 

 puncturing the base of the flowers and rendering 

 the pod more or less abortive. Curtis, in his 

 " Farm Insects," p. 351, records a case of a 

 garden of scarlet runners being entirely 

 destroyed in this way near Manchester. 

 Psithyrus, Lep. — Apathus, Newm. — A genus of inquiline 

 bees attacking the nests of the nearly-related 

 Bombi. These insects are heavy and listless in 

 flight, and thus distinguishable upon the wing 

 from their busy and active hosts. As with other 

 inquilines, they consist of male and female only, 

 without workers. Unlike the absolute dissimi- 

 larity between the waspish Nomadas and their 

 hosts the Andrenas, the Psithyri greatly resemble 

 in form, and in many instances also in colour, 

 the Bombi whose nests they invade ; and this is 



