PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 833 
furnish themselves with three different materials : —the nectar of fowers, 
from which they elaborate honey and wax ; the pollen or fertilising dust 
of the anthers, of which they make what is called bee-bread, serving as 
food both to old and young; and the resinous substance called by the an- 
cients Propolis, Pissoceros, &c., used in various ways in rendering the hive 
secure and giving the finish to the combs. The first of these substances 
is the pure fluid secreted in the nectaries of flowers, which the length of 
their tongue enables them to reach in most blossoms. The tongue of a 
bee, you are to observe, though so long, and sometimes so inflated ', is not 
a tube through which the honey passes, nor a pump acting by suction, but 
areal tongue, which laps or licks the honey, and passes it down ‘on its 
upper surface, as we do, to the mouth, which is at its base concealed by 
the mandibles? It is conveyed by this orifice through the esophagus into 
the first stomach, which we call the honey-bag, and which, from being 
very small, is swelled when full of it to a considerable size. Honey is 
never found in the second stomach (which is surrounded with muscular 
rings, and resembles a cask covered with hoops from one end to the other), 
but only in the first : in the latter and the intestines the bee-bread only is 
discovered. How the wax is secreted, or what vessels are appropriated 
to that purpose, is not yet’ ascertained: Huber suspects that a cellular 
substance, consisting of hexagons, which lines the membrane of the wax- 
pockets, may be concerned in this operation. This substance he also dis- 
covered in humble-bees (which, though they make wax, have no wax- 
pockets), occupying all the anterior part or base of the segments.* If you 
wish to see the wax-pockets in the hive-bee, you must press the abdomen 
so as to cause it to extend itself; you will then find on each of the four 
intermediate ventral segments, separated by the carina or elevated central 
part, two trapeziform whitish pockets, of a soft membranaceous texture : 
on these the laminze of wax are formed, and they are found upon them in 
different states, so as to be more or less perceptible. I must here observe 
that, besides Thorley, who seems to have been the first apiarist that ob- 
served these laminee, Wildman was not ignorant of them, nor of the wax 
being formed from honey*: we must not, therefore, permit foreigners to 
appropriate to themselves the whole credit of discoveries that have been 
made, or at least partially made, by our own countrymen. 
Long before Linné had discovered the nectary of flowers, our in- 
dustrious creatures: had‘ made ‘themselves intimate with every form and 
vatiety of them ; and no botanist, even in this enlightened era of botanical 
science, can compare with a bee in this respect. The station of these re- 
“O Nature kind! O labourer wise! 
That roam’st along the summer’s ray, 
Glean’st every bliss thy life supplies, 
And meet’st prepared thy wintry day! 
Go, envied go—with crowded gates 
The hive thy rich return awaits ; . 
Bear home thy store, in triumph gays 
And shame each idler of the day.’ 
1 Reaum, vy. t. xxviii. f. 1, 2. 2 Ibid. f. 7. o. 
5 Huber, ii. 5. t ii. f, 8. 4 Wildman, 43. 
