GENERAL HISTORY OF BEES. 
57 
onwards from the merely burrowing-bee to the more 
complicated processes of the masons, carpenters, and 
upholsterers,—all solitary insects, and working each in¬ 
dividually and separately to the accomplishment of its 
object. But we may certainly inquire where we shall 
intercalate the sagacity of the cuckoo-bees. A vast 
bound is immediately made from the artisan bees to 
the social bees with three sexes, which, as first shown in 
the humble-bee, works in small and rude communities, 
with dwellings of irregular construction. The next and 
most perfect grade is the metropolitan polity, accom¬ 
plished architecture, laborious parsimony, indomitable 
perseverance, and well-organized subordination of the 
involuntary friend of man, the domestic bee. This in¬ 
sect has furnished Scriptural figures of exquisite sweet¬ 
ness, poetry with pleasing metaphors, morality with 
aphorisms, and the most elegant of the Latin poets with 
the subject of the supremest of his perfect Georgies. 
That bees feel pain may be assumed from the evidence 
we have of their feeling pleasure, although instances are 
on record of insects surviving for months impaled; and 
they lose a limb, or even an antenna, without evincing 
much suffering, and I have seen a humble-bee crawling 
along on the ground with its abdomen entirely torn 
away. 
In speaking of the antennae above, as possibly the 
organs of hearing, I would wish to add, that they evi¬ 
dently possess some complex function, of which, not 
possessing any analogy, we cannot certainly conceive any 
notion. They are observed to be used as instruments 
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of touch, and that too of the nicest discrimination. They 
seem to be extremely sensitive to the vibrations of sound 
and the undulations of air, and keenly appreciative of 
