24 
BRITISH BEES. 
peculiarities of structure, it will be desirable to take a 
rapid survey of the external anatomy of the bee, for it 
will enable me to introduce in due order the requisite 
technicalities with their local explanations. This course 
will be found most subservient to preciseness and accu¬ 
racy, and when mastered, which will be found to be a 
very simple affair, it will greatly facilitate exact compre¬ 
hension. No circumlocution can convey what a few 
technicalities, thoroughly understood, will immediately 
explain, and no special scientific work can be read with 
any profit until they are acquired. 
Diagrams are introduced to aid the imagination in its 
conception of what is meant to be conveyed. 
This necessary detail I shall endeavour to make as 
entertaining as I possibly can, by introducing, with the 
description of the organ, the uses it serves in the 
economy of the insect. 1 hope thus to add an interest 
to it which a merely 
tion would not possess. 
Structure is always expressive of the habits of the 
bees, and is as sure a line of separation, or means of 
combination, as instinct could be were it tangible. 
Hence the conclusion always follows with a certainty 
that such-and-such a form is identical with such-and- 
such habits, and that, in the broad and most distinguish¬ 
ing features of its economy, the genus is essentially the 
same in every climate. Climate does not act upon these 
lower forms of animal life, with the modifying influences 
it exercises upon the mammalia and man. A Megachile 
is as essentially a Megachile in all its characteristics in 
Arctic America, the Brazils, tropical Africa, Northern 
China, and Van Diemen’s Land, as in these islands, and 
Apis is, wherever it occurs, as truly an Apis. Therefore 
dry technical and scientific defini- 
