148 



PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 



with the honey, and may be named the ambrosia of the hive, 

 since from it the bee-bread is made. Sometimes a bee is so 

 discoloured with this powder as to look like a different insect, 

 becoming white, yellow, or orange, according to the flowers 

 in which it has been busy. Reaumur was urged to visit the 

 hives of a gentleman, who on this account thought his bees 

 were different from the common kind. 1 He suspected, and it 

 proved, that the circumstance just mentioned occasioned the 

 mistaken 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 dis- 

 sipate 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 2 

 on her hind legs. 



Aristotle says that in each journey from the hive, bees at- 

 tend only one species of flower 3 ; Reaumur, however, seems 

 to think that they fly indiscriminately from one to another : 

 but Mr. Dobbs, in the Philosophical Transactions 4 , and Butler 

 before him, asserts that he has frequently followed a bee en- 

 gaged in collecting pollen, &c, and invariably observed that it 

 continued collecting from the same kind of flowers with which 

 it first began ; passing over every other species, however nu- 

 merous, even though the flower it first selected was scarcer 

 than others. His observations, he thinks, are confirmed, and 

 the idea seems not unreasonable, by the uniform colour of 

 the pellets of pollen, and their different size. Reaumur him- 

 self 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 par- 

 ticular flowers, the pollen of whose anthers is of those colours. 5 

 Sprengel, as before intimated, has made an observation simi- 

 lar to that of Dobbs. It seems not improbable that the rea- 

 son why the bee visits the same species of plants during one 



1 Reaum. 295. 



2 Kirby, Monogr. Ap. Angl. i. t. 12. * *. e. 1. neut. f. 19. a. b. 



3 Hist. Anim. 1. ix. c. 40. 4 xlvi. 536. 

 5 Ubi supra, 301 . 



