DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 329 



that has probably been attended to ages before our hive- 

 bee, is Apis fasciata of Latreiile, a kind so extensively 

 cultivated in Egypt, that Niebuhr states he fell in upon 

 the Nile, between Cairo and Damietta, with a convoy of 

 4000 hives, which were transporting from a region where 

 the season for flowers had passed, to one where the spring- 

 was later a . Columella says that the Greeks in like man- 

 ner sent their bee- hives every year from Achaia into At- 

 tica ; and a similar custom is not unknown in Italy, and 

 even in this country in the neighbourhood of heaths. In 

 Madagascar, according to Latreiile, the inhabitants have 

 domesticated Apis unicolor ; A. indica is cultivated in 

 India at Pondicherry and in Bengal ; A. Adanso?iii, Latr. 

 at Senegal 5 ; and Fabricius thinks that A. acraensis {Cen- 

 trist Syst. Piez.) laboriosa, and others in the East and 

 West Indies, might be domesticated with greater advan- 

 tage than even A. mellifica c . 



The last, and doubtless the most valuable, product of 

 insects to which I have to advert is Silk. To estimate just- 

 ly the importance of this article, it is not sufficient to view 

 it as an appendage of luxury unrivalled for richness, lustre, 

 and beauty ; and without which courts would lose hall' 

 their splendour. We must consider it, what it actually is, 

 as the staple article of cultivation in many large provinces 

 in the South of Europe, amongst the inhabitants of which 

 the prospect of a deficient crop causes as great alarm as a 

 scanty harvest of grain with us ; and after giving employ- 

 ment to tens of thousands in its first production and trans- 



a Lutr. Hist. Nat. xiv. 20. 



b Latr, in Humboldt and Bonpland, Recueilj &c, 303, 



c Vorlestcngen, 324. 



