BEES AND THEIR ENEMIES. 
Ill 
their nutriment, is extremely improbable. It is far more 
likely that instinct lias taught them to be conveyed 
elsewhere through the medium of the bee, as they might 
also be bv attaching; themselves to any other volatile 
insect, and that upon arriving at a suitable locality they 
descend from their temporary hippogriff. We see seeds 
thus conveyed by the agency of animals and birds to 
suitable places, where they fall and germinate. 
Another little hexapod is occasionally found upon 
them : this is intensely black, and like the former, very 
active : these I never could rear, nor did they ever seem 
to enlarge, and they speedily died. I have found them 
in profusion also within the flowers of syngenesious or 
composite plants, especially of the dandelion in the 
spring. 
But their most remarkable personal parasites consist 
of some very extraordinary insects, so anomalous in 
their structure as to have required the construction of 
an order for their reception,—the Order Strepsiptera, or 
“ twisted-winged,” thus named from the twist taken by 
their anterior wings or wing-cases. Their natural history 
is but imperfectly known, and I believe the males have 
not yet been discovered. Their larva lives within the 
4 / 
bee, and feeds on its viscera by absorption, being at¬ 
tached within by a sort of umbilical cord. It presently 
consumes the viscera, and renders the bee abortive, by 
destroying its ovaries, for it is usually upon female bees 
that it is found. When full fed it forms a case within 
which it changes into the pupa and imago, the head of 
which case protrudes between the scales of one of the 
dorsal segments of the abdomen. How it becomes depo¬ 
sited within the bee or the bee’s larva remains a mystery, 
although many hypotheses have been hazarded to account 
