PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS 351 
autumn, but few have appeared. Mr. Knight observed this in 1806, and 
supposes it to be caused by a failure of males! 1 have since more than 
once made the same observation ; and Major Moor, as well as myself, 
noticed it in the year 1815. What took place here in the following year 
may in some degree account for it. Though the summer had been very 
wet, and one may almost say winterly, there were in the neighbourhood 
in which I reside abundance of wasps at the usual time; but except on 
some few warm days, in which they were very active, benumbed by the 
cold, they were crawling about on the floors of my house, and seemed 
unable to fly. In this vicinity numbers make their nests in the banks of 
the river. In the beginning of the month of October there was a very con- 
siderable inundation, after which not a single wasp was to be seen, The 
continued wet that produces an inundation may also destroy those nests 
that are out of the reach of the waters; and perhaps this cause may have 
operated in those years above alluded to in, which the appearance of the 
workers in the summer and autumn did not correspond with the large 
numbers of females observed in the spring. 
In ordinary seasons, in the month lately mentioned, October, wasps 
seem to became less savage and sanguinary ; for even flies, of which earlier 
in the summer they are the pitiless destroyers, may be seen to enter their 
nests with impunity. It is then, probably, that they begin to be first 
affected by the approach of the cold season, when nature teaches them it 
is useless longer to attend to their young. They themselves all perish, 
except a few of the females, upon the first attack of frost. 
Reaumur, from whom (see the sixth Memoir of his last volume) most of 
these observations are taken, put the nests of wasps under glass-hives, and 
succeeded so effectually in reconciling these little restless creatures to them 
that they carried on their various works under his eye; and if you feel 
disposed to follow his example, I have no doubt you will throw light 
upon many parts of their history, concerning which we are now in dark- 
ness, 
Having given you some idea, imperfect indeed from the want of mate- 
tials, of the societies of wasps, I must next draw up for you the best 
account I can of those of the humble-bees.? These form a kind of inter- 
mediate link between the wasps and the hive-bees, collecting honey indeed 
and making wax, but constructing their combs and cells without the geo- 
metric precision of the latter, and of a more rude and rustic kind of 
architecture; and distinguished from both, though they approach nearer to 
the bees, by the extreme hairiness of their bodies. 
The population of a humble-bees’ nest may be divided into four orders 
of individuals : the large females ; the small females ; the males; and the 
workers, 
The large females, like the female wasps, are the original founders of 
their republics. They are often so large, that by the side of the small ones 
or the workers, which in every other respect they exactly resemble, they 
look like giants opposed to pigmies. ‘They are excluded from the pupa 
in the autumn; and pair in that season, with males produced from the 
eggs of the small females. ‘They pass the winter underground, and, as 
appears from an observation of M. P. Huber, in a particular apartment, 
' Phil. Trans. for 1807, 248. 2 Bombus Apis * *. e. 2. K. 
