ERRORS OF HUNTER. 109 



majority of the English apiarians must be wholly defective 

 and fallacious. 



Mr. Rennie is loud in his praises of the late Mr. John 

 Hunter, relative to his knowledge of the natural economy of 

 the bee ; whereas, in the first place, there is scarcely any 

 writer on that subject, who has fallen into greater errors in 

 his description of the actions and habits of the bee, than Mr. 

 Hunter; and in the second place, there is scarcely any 

 authority which Mr. Rennie could have selected, which in 

 many respects is more opposed to the system of Huber, than 

 that of Hunter himself. As one proof of the inaccuracy of 

 Mr. Hunter, we will mention his statement that the bees 

 deposit their excrement at the bottom of a cell, and that this 

 excrement is never cleared away by the common bees, but 

 is allowed to accumulate, so that in time the cells become 

 nearly full. Now the real case is, that the bees never vent 

 any excrement in the hive at all, unless under the influence 

 of the dysentery or any other disease, when it appears on the 

 platform in the shape of small brownish spots of the colour 

 of linseed, the natural colour of the fasces of the bee being 

 of a muddy yellow. The bee, however, never vents its excre- 

 ment in the cell under any circumstances whatever, but 

 Hunter mistook the accumulation of the bee bread * for the 

 excrement of the bee ; and thus was he the instrument of 

 promulgating an error under the sanction of his high au- 

 thority, which even the veriest scholar in apiarian knowledge 

 could have refuted. 



We will now proceed to consult Mr. Hunter on the sub- 

 ject of the stinging of a bee, and he says, " that when they 

 attack each other, they seldom or never use their stings, only 

 their pincers ; yet I once saw two bees engaged, and one 

 stung the other in the mouth or thereabouts, and the sting 

 was drawn from the body to which it belonged, and the one 



* See the chapter on bee bread for a further exposition of the errors of 

 Hunter. 



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