Wasps, Bees, and Ants 
5 ii 
While bumblebees and honey-bees are the everywhere common, con¬ 
spicuous, and familiar representatives of the great superfamily of bees, the 
Apoidea, they include but a fraction of the nearly one thousand different 
kinds of bees so far recorded as occurring in this country. Indeed, all of 
our social honey-bees, although variously called German, Italian, Carniolans, 
etc., belong to a single species, and that not a native but an imported one. 
Of the bumblebees a few more than fifty native species are known. Besides 
the hive-bee and the bumblebee, then, there are nearly a thousand other bees 
in the American fauna to be taken into account. As among the wasps, 
there are parasitic, guest, solitary, and social kinds of bees; and as among 
the solitary wasps there are diggers, miners, carpenters, and masons, so 
also there are miner-, carpenter-, and mason-bees. There are bees which 
lay their eggs in the nests of other bees, so that their young feed on the stored 
food of the hosts; there are bees which make nest-burrows in the ground, 
others that tunnel in stems of plants and wood, others that mould clay cells, 
others that cut leaves and line their nest bored into the pith of canes, others 
that live in communities underground which break up each year, and finally, 
most conspicuous among them all, there is the familiar species that lives in 
great persistent communities in hives and hollow trees. 
All these thousand bee kinds can be conveniently and naturally primarily 
grouped into two divisions, the short-tongued bees (Fig. 716) (those with 
a short, broad, flattened, spoon-like tongue) 
and the long-tongued bees (Fig. 717) (those with 
a slender, elongate, subcylindrical flexible tongue). 
In the older books these groups were called fami¬ 
lies, namely the Andrenidae (short-tongued bees) 
and the Apidae (long-tongued bees), but modern 
systematists, while still recognizing the con¬ 
venience of this primary grouping, classify bees 
into a dozen families or more. For the purposes 
of this book, however, we shall recognize a group¬ 
ing on structural characters into simply two main 
divisions, short-tongued and long-tongued, and 
another grouping, on a basis of habit and of 
psychologic development, into three general groups, 
namely, solitary bees, gregarious bees, and com¬ 
munal bees. 
The structural characters in which all bees 
agree among themselves and differ from the other Hymenoptera are the pos¬ 
session of branched or feathery hairs on the head and thorax and of swollen 
or expanded and flattened tarsal segments: the pronotum does not extend 
back to the tegulae of the wings as is the case with the Sphecoid wasps, 
Fig. 716.—Mouth-parts of a 
short-tongued bee, Prosopis 
pubescens. Note short, 
broad, flap - like tongue 
(glossa of labium). (After 
Sharp; much enlarged.) 
