182 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 
orange, according to the flowers in which it has been 
busy. Reaumur was urged to visit the hives of a gentle- 
man, who on this account thought his bees were different 
from the common kind*. He suspected, and it proved, 
that the circumstance just mentioned occasioned the mis- 
taken notion. When the body of the bee is covered with 
farina, with the brushes of its legs, especially of the hind 
ones, it wipes it off: not, as we do with our dusty clothes, 
to dissipate and disperse it in the air, but to collect every 
particle of it, and then to knead it and form it into two 
little masses, which she places, one in each, in the baskets 
formed by hairs® on her hind legs. 
Aristotle says that in each journey from the hive, bees ~ 
attend only one species of flower*; Reaumur, however, 
seems to think that they fly indiscriminately from one to 
another: but Mr. Dobbs in the Phzlosophical Transac- 
tions*, and Butler before him, asserts that he has fre- 
quently followed a bee engaged in collecting pollen, &c. 
and invariably observed that it continued collecting from 
the same kind of flowers with which it first began: passing 
over other species, however numerous, even though the 
flower it first selected was scarcer than others. His ob- 
servations, he thinks, are confirmed—and the idea seems 
not unreascnable—by the uniform colour of the pellets of 
pollen, and their different size. Reaumur himself tells us 
that the bees enter the hive, some with yellow pellets, 
others with red ones, others again with whitish ones, and 
that sometimes they are even green: upon which he ob- 
serves, that this arises from their being collected from 
_2 Reaum 295. 
> Kirby, AZonogr, Ap. Angl.i. t, 12. * *. e. 1. neut. £19. a. 5. 
© Hist. Anim. |, ix. c. 40. a xivi. 536: 
