FOREIGN BEES. 
279 
them by longer or shorter flights, according to the 
greater or lesser distance of the object of pursuit. 
If its followers lag behind, it returns with manifest 
impatience, and by its redoubled cries appears to 
chide their delay. As it approaches the tree, its 
flights become more limited, its whistle is repeated 
at shorter intervals, and at last, having brought its 
associates to the desired spot, it hovers over it for a 
moment, as if to marie it out distinctly, and then 
quietly takes up a station at a little distance, wait- 
ing the result, and expecting its share of the booty, 
which it never fails to obtain. 
In the island of Madagascar, and the Mauritius, 
is to be found the Apia Unicolor of Latreille, of a 
bright shining black, without spots or coloured bands. 
Its hone)’, as appears from a specimen brought home 
by the master of a French vessel, is highly aromatic, 
and is, while in the cells, or when recently abstracted, 
of a green colour, but becomes afterwards of a red- 
dish yellow. In these islands, the bee is domesti- 
cated ; and a French Naturalist, M. de Lanux, has 
published a memoir on the form of the Madagascar 
hives — a circumstance which naturally leads to the 
supposition, that the inhabitants pay considerable at- 
tention to the cultivation of this insect.* 
Knox, in his history of Ceylon, enumerates three 
kinds of bees found in that island ; the first of which 
bears a close resemblance to the European insect, 
though, it would seem, by no means so irritable, and 
which, like those near the Cape of Good Hope, builds 
* Latreille, Obs. de Zool. au voyage de Humboldt. 
