414 



HABITATIONS OF INSECTS. 



But in the first place you must be told of an important 

 and unlooked-for discovery of this unrivalled detector of the 

 hidden mysteries of nature — that the workers or neuters^ as 

 they are called, of a hive, consist of two descriptions of 

 individuals, one of which he calls abeilles nourrices, or petites 

 abeilleSf the other abeilles cir teres. The former, or nurse bees, 

 are smaller than the latter ; their stomach is not capable of 

 such distention; and their office is to build the combs and 

 cells after the foundation has been laid by the cirieres, to 

 collect honey, and to feed the larvae. The abeilles cirieres 

 are the makers of wax, which substance Huber has now 

 indisputably ascertained to be secreted, as John Hunter long 

 ago suspected, beneath the ventral segments, from between 

 which it is taken by the bees when wanted, in the form of 

 thin scales. The apparatus in which the wax is secreted 

 consists of four pair of membranous bags or wax-pockets, 

 situated at the base of each intermediate segment, one on 

 each side, which can only be seen by pressing the abdomen 

 so as to lengthen it, being usually concealed by the over- 

 lapping of the preceding segments. It should be observed 

 that this discovery was nearly made by our countryman 

 Thorley, who, in his Female Monarch^/ (1744), says that he 

 has taken bees with six pieces of wax within the plaits of the 

 abdomen, three on each side. In these pockets the wax is 

 secreted by some unknown process from the food taken into 

 the stomach, which in the wax-making bees is much larger 

 than in the nurse-bees, and afterwards transpires through the 

 membrane of the wax-pocket in thin laminse. The nurse- 

 bees, however, do secrete wax , but in very small quantities. 

 When wax is not wanted in the hive, the wax-makers dis- 

 gorge their honey into the cells. 



The process of building the combs in a bee-hive, as ob- 

 served by Huber, is as follows : — 



The wax-makers, having taken a due portion of honey or 

 sugar, from either of which wax can be elaborated, suspend 

 themselves to each other, the claws of the forelegs of the 

 lowermost being attached to those of the hind pair of the 

 uppermost, and form themselves into a cluster, the exterior 

 layer of which looks like a kind of curtain. This cluster con- 



