Honey Bee
(Apis mellifica). This is not the suitable occasion to give a full account of the structure and habits of the Honey Bee, or Hive Bee, and of its allies; but these insects are of such great value to horticulturists, because of the part they perform in the conveyance of pollen from flower to flower, and thereby securing the production of healthy seed, that they cannot be passed by in silence. Their habits, &c., will be again treated of under Wasps (which see), with which they agree in many of their social customs. The Bees form a numerous group of insects, with a considerable general similarity of aspect. All have the habit of making cells for the protection of the eggs and larvae. The Solitary Bees form these cells either in galleries hollowed out by themselves, or in holes or nests, built by them of mud or other materials. The Humble Bees and Honey Bees build the cells of wax secreted from their bodies. They collect the pollen and the honey or nectar from flowers, and feed their larvae on a mixture of these substances: hence, they have to make constant visits to flowers. The honey is also stored up in wax cells as food for their own use in winter. Among the Solitary Bees, only males and females can be distinguished, and the latter do all the work of providing for the larvae. The Honey Bees comprise males or drones, perfect females or queens (usually one in each nest), and undeveloped females, called neuters or workers. The accompanying woodcuts, which were engraved from drawings made by Mr. Frank Cheshire, for his large work on Bee-keeping, show the relative sizes and forms of the three. After the queen is impregnated, the drones are killed by the workers. The queen's share in providing for the welfare of the community is restricted to laying eggs. On the workers falls all the work, viz., attending to the young brood, collecting food, and such-like duties. If, by any accident, the queen is lost, the workers can cause a worker-larva to develop into a queen, by supplying it with special food and enlarging the cell in which it lives. Returning now to the relation of Bees to flowers, we find that they are specially suited to remove the honey from flowers in which it is situated at the bottom of a tube of more than 1/4in. long. The proboscis of the worker is formed of five pieces, of which the central piece (tongue) bears hairs near the tip, and is used to lick up the honey with. Flowers with honey at the bottom of narrow tubes, are specially attractive to Honey Bees, as in such it is beyond the reach of most other insects, and affords, therefore, a good supply to the Bees. To fit the workers for collecting the pollen, their hind legs have the middle joint (tibia) concave on one side, and furnished with rows of hairs, so placed as to retain the pollen, as in a shallow vessel. Certain flowers are of such a form that few other insects than Bees can reach the pollen or the nectar in them. Flowers adapted for fertilisation by Bees, e.g., Antirrhinum, have the stamens and stigmas so situated that, in visiting the flowers, the insects must become dusted with the pollen, and it is conveyed to the stigma of the next flower of the same kind visited by them. Hence, they generally effect cross-fertilisation, the value of which, in the production of well-developed and healthy seeds, has been proved by experiment in many kinds of plants. (See Darwin's "Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom.") The Honey Bee seldom extracts the honey through holes bored in the flower tube, as the Humble Bee sometimes does, to the detriment of the flowers. On comparing the various kinds of Bees with the Honey Bee, the latter is found to be the most perfectly adapted of all the species for the collection of honey and pollen, and for insuring cross-fertilisation of the flowers it frequents to obtain these. Honey Bees usually restrict their visits more or less to one or two species of plant each day. Works that give much information on Bees are, among others: Huber's "New Observations on the Natural History of Bees," Kirby and Spence's "Introduction to Entomology," Bevan's "The Honey Bee," Shuckard's "British Bees," and Cheshire's "Bee-keeping: its Science and Practice."