156 
BRITISH BEES. 
fabricated of a coarser material than those within the 
hive, and wherein also the several compartments form a 
more homogeneous unity, and the uniformity of the 
several layers or floors is more in accordance with archi¬ 
tectural symmetry,—yet must the palm of precedence 
he accorded to the bee, from the more elaborate and per¬ 
fect development of the social instinctive faculty. 
We may be the more excused for this preference 
when we weigh the interest of the genus Apis to man. 
The wasp boots us nothing, but is the pilferer of our 
fruits, and a marauder upon the hive, whose inhabitants 
it destroys and consumes their produce, it being in¬ 
different to them which they obtain—the bee or the 
honey,—either furnishing them with sustenance. The 
ant is obtrusive and incommodious, making incursions 
upon the pantry, the store-room, the green-house, and 
the hot-house; disfiguring our flower-beds, and often 
disgusting us with our aliment by the impertinent in¬ 
trusion of its appearance. But the bee stores up for us 
honey, whose cruses are as inexhaustible as the oil cruse 
of the good widow of Zarephath, and whose waxen shards 
furnish us with a beautifully soft light, which in Ca¬ 
tholic worship adds solemnity to the rites of religion. 
In doing this the bee fulfils a sovereign function in the 
economy of nature, by the fertilization of the flower¬ 
ing plants, with which she reciprocates benefits; the 
preponderance, however, is importantly in favour of the 
flower. 
If captious objectors should dispute the position we 
thus claim for the bees, we will willingly leave them the 
wasp with its sting, whilst we sedulously cultivate the 
active and industrious bee, whose associations range 
through all the fields of poetry, but nowhere more lusci- 
