142 
THE ENTOMOLOGIST’S WEEKLY INTELLIGENCER. 
“ The young animals are born very soon 
after the eggs are laid. They are about 
g ' 5 th of an inch in length, and ^th in 
diameter at the broadest part. They are 
very active ; the skin has the appearance 
of being ringed. The head is pointed; 
the tail ends more abruptly, and makes 
a sudden curve. The anterior end of the 
body is transparent; but the rest is 
darkened by minute, round, strongly- 
refracting globules. 
“ As soon as the humble-bees come 
out in spring young Sphcerulari may be 
found, together with old ones, in some of 
them. I have met with them from the 
beginning of May to the middle of July, 
and the whole abdominal cavity of the 
liumble-bee often swarms with these little 
worms. In order to ascertain roughly 
what the number might be I washed out 
the inside of a bee, and then collected all 
the Sphcerulari together. I then put 
them into a measuring bottle, and after 
shaking up poured away half the contents. 
Repeating this process till only about a 
hundred were left, it was easy to calculate 
what the number must have been, if half 
had been removed a given number of 
times, though of course no great accuracy 
was thus attainable. I repeated this ex- 
periment five times, and thence concluded 
that one specimen contained about fifty 
thousand young Spluerulari, three about 
sixty thousand, and one even over a 
hundred thousand ! It seems almost in- 
conceivable that a bee should live with 
such an immense number of parasites in 
its body ; and still more so that it should, 
meanwhile, go about its daily duties as 
if nothing was the matter. 
“ It would seem, at first sight, that the 
history of the young Sphcerulari was very 
simple. We might suppose that the in- 
fected bees would die in their nests; 
and that the young worms would then 
leave them, and immediately eat their 
way into other bees. This view would 
also be supported by the fact that, at 
least as far as my experience goes, each 
infected bee contains, on an average, five 
or six Sphcerulari. Two reasons, however, 
inconsistent though they may appear, 
militate against this supposition. The 
first is, that too large a proportion of the 
young Sphcerulari would live; and the 
second is, that the whole race must soon 
perish. For, if their history were so 
simple, there seems no reason why a 
large proportion of young might not sur- 
vive; and the species would then con- 
tinually increase in numbers, which is 
impossible. This argument is, however, 
far from conclusive, because the increase 
may be prevented by disease, or by some 
enemy. On the other hand, there would, 
under this theory, be no means by which 
the parasites could pass from bees of one 
nest to those of another ; so that in each 
species we should have one race infested 
by Sphcerulari and another free from 
them; in which case it can hardly be 
doubted that the former race would, in 
the struggle for existence, gradually be 
supplanted by the latter, and thus in time 
the Sphcerulari would all perish. 
“ That the young Sphcerulari can live 
some time after leaving the body of 
the bee, and without entering any other 
animal, I ascertained satisfactorily. On 
the 25th of last May I took some from 
the body of B. lucorum, and pul them in 
water, where some of them remained 
alive till the 9th of August, though 
during the latter pari of the time they 
were far from lively. In this case, there- 
fore, they lived in water for more than 
ten weeks. Whether they would have 
lived as long in damp earth I cannot 
say, but it seems not improbable; and 
as we know that humble-bees often crawl 
about under leaves and grass, they may 
in this manner, give the young Sphceru- 
lari an opportunity of entering them. 
I tried to solve this question by wetting 
humble-bees with water containing young 
Sphcerulari ; but, partly owing to the 
difficulty of keeping these insects in con- 
finement alive for more than a few days, 
