3 ae 




308 THE INSECT WORLD. 
their hind legs and agitate their wings, you can do with them 
almost anything you ike—cut away the honeycomb, abstract the 
eggs, Or take out the honey—without their troubling themselves 


Fig. 331.—Bellows used to stupify Bees. 
about it. But this state of things must not last too long, or you 
may suffocate your bees. It is a sort of anzsthesis into which 
the bees have been thrown; and as with men this must not be 
prolonged. 
Some bee-keepers, in order to collect the honey harvest, stupify 
their bees by burning sulphur matches. This is a bad practice. 
‘Those authors who recommend us to suffocate the bees,” says 
M. Hamet, “under the pretext that their colonies will become 
too numerous, and who add, ‘ You cannot eat beef without killing 
the ox,’ are more stupid than the animal they have chosen for 
their comparison.” A hive often produces from twelve to twenty 
pounds of honey each year, and an almost equal quantity of wax. 
It may, then, furnish to the bee-keeper an important revenue, 
especially as the rearing of bees gives scarcely any trouble, and 
involves scarcely any labour, as it is only necessary to select a 
spot with a proper exposure and well-supplied with flowers. 
We possess in Europe two species or races of bees— the 
Common bee (Apis mellifica), and the Ligurian bee (Apes ligus- 
tica), whose abdomen is tawny, with the rings bordered with 
black. It is this species of which Virgil sang, and which 1s found 
in Italy and Greece. It has been remarked that the Ligurian bee 
pierces the calices, at their bases, of those flowers which are too 
long for it to penetrate into easily, and thus gets possession of 
the honey, whilst the common bees pass these flowers over. This 
observation proves that the former is the more intelligent of the 
two races. In Egypt a bee is reared called the Banded bee (Apis 
fasciata). 
Ten or twelve other species of honey-bees exist in Senegal, the 
Cape of Good Hope, Madagascar, Hast Indies, at Timor (Apes 
Peronii), &c. The European bee has been acclimatised in 

