FESTOONS OF HUBER. 389 



men, who only bring the materials, but who possess not 

 sufficient skill to impart to those materials any definite 

 shape. The former, Huber ranks in the class of nurse-bees, 

 the latter in that of wax-workers, or such on whom nature 

 has bestowed pockets or reticules, in which they carry the 

 wax about with them. There is also a decided distinction 

 in the labours of the nurse-bees and the wax-workers, and 

 it would be as ridiculous and presumptuous in the former to 

 attempt to manipulate the wax, as it would be in the latter to 

 attempt to make it. The wax-makers are represented by 

 Huber as gorging themselves to direct satiety with honey 

 from the flowers, and having filled their vesicle to suffoca- 

 tion, they by some miraculous concert of action meet in a 

 body, and hang motionless in festoons, that is, like folds of 

 curtains, one above another, and in twenty-four hours, not 

 more nor less, the white scales of wax appear under the 

 rings of the abdomen ! ! ! 



Deeply is it to be deplored, that the Committee of the So- 

 ciety for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge should have 

 allowed the pages of their miscellany to be sullied by such 

 a tissue of error and misrepresentation. In that work we 

 have a drawing presented to us of this festoon of wax- 

 workers, a phenomenon never beheld by Huber, nor by any 

 other person who has paid even the slightest attention to 

 the interna] economy of a hive. The bee is, in every in- 

 stance, exteriorly to the hive a solitary worker; he leaves 

 the hive alone ; he directs his flight to the well-known fields 

 of his pasture ; he returns to the hive apparently careless 

 and independent of the rest of the community, and attentive 

 only to the particular labour in which he is engaged. And 

 then the time during which the bees hang so gracefully in 

 the form of a festoon, how very consistent is the whole tale 

 with all truth and experience. In twenty-four hours the wax 

 has exuded, it appears in scales under the rings of the abdo- 



