. Birds of other lands, reptiles, fishes, jointed animals and lower forms; . - limited bythe dimensions of the hive itself. 310 THE LIVING ANIMALS OF THE WORLD Tlie ancients liad observed something of the econoni)- of bees, but nian_\- of their ideason the subject were strangel\- fantastic. It was perhaps natural to suppose that the leader ofthe bees was a king rather tiian a queen ; but it was also supposed that a swarm of beescould be obtained by killing an ox and leaving the carcase to rot. This notion appears to haveoriginated in swarms of flies, more or less resembling bees, having been n
. Birds of other lands, reptiles, fishes, jointed animals and lower forms; . - limited bythe dimensions of the hive itself. 310 THE LIVING ANIMALS OF THE WORLD Tlie ancients liad observed something of the econoni)- of bees, but nian_\- of their ideason the subject were strangel\- fantastic. It was perhaps natural to suppose that the leader ofthe bees was a king rather tiian a queen ; but it was also supposed that a swarm of beescould be obtained by killing an ox and leaving the carcase to rot. This notion appears to haveoriginated in swarms of flies, more or less resembling bees, having been noticed flsing round ornear putrefying carcases. Among all the truly social insects— hive-bees, wasps, ants, and termites, or so-calledwhite ants—we find that the bulk of the community consists of sterile females, and the numberof fertile females is very small, even in those cases where more than one female is permitted tolive in a nest, as among Pn,t, b, C. Rtidl I ll;:hs BEES Slvarming from the hiie after the queen li\e in small communities, consisting of males, females, and workers; buttheir economy is \ery simple compared with that of the hive-bee, and they do not confinethemselves to a single female to a nest. The Bees are ver\ numerous in species, and consist onl}- of males and do not live in communities, but each female constructs a dwelling for her ownyoung. Many of them burrow in the ground, and thej- are so far gregarious that a largenumber of females will sometimes form their burrows near each other in the same solitary bees are very varied in their habits, and some of them are parasitic on otherspecies. The large , which form their nests in wood, are not British ; but thereare some small species which make theirs in the interior of bramble-sticks. Some are veryhairy; others are smooth, and look at first sight like small wasps, being banded with black andye
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecad, booksubjectfishes, booksubjectzoology
