. Handbook of flower pollination : based upon Hermann Mu?ller's work 'The fertilisation of flowers by insects' . Fertilization of plants. HYMENOPTERA—BEES 159 When the honey-bees and humble-bees, the complex suciorial apparatus of which, in its various activities, has just been described after Hermann Muller's account, are declared by this investigator to be the most important of all insects in the pollination of our native flowers, his assertion, of course, only applies to those individuals concerned in the care of the young, i. e. the workers among honey-bees, and the females and workers amo
. Handbook of flower pollination : based upon Hermann Mu?ller's work 'The fertilisation of flowers by insects' . Fertilization of plants. HYMENOPTERA—BEES 159 When the honey-bees and humble-bees, the complex suciorial apparatus of which, in its various activities, has just been described after Hermann Muller's account, are declared by this investigator to be the most important of all insects in the pollination of our native flowers, his assertion, of course, only applies to those individuals concerned in the care of the young, i. e. the workers among honey-bees, and the females and workers among the humble-bees. In all bees which provide for their own young, the males, H. Miiller goes on to say, are of much less use in pollinating plants than the females, as they only look after their own maintenance^ and consequently neither collect pollen, nor visit flowers very diligently. Yet, in all species in which a more or less thick coat of feathery hairs has become developed upon the bodies of the females, this is also present in the males, so that they, since they visit flowers, transfer pollen as well as the female. It is otherwise with most of those bees which have acquired the habit of laying their eggs in the nests of other bees already stored with larval food, instead of nourishing their brood on flower-food they have themselves tint Fig 6g Mouth-parts 0/ a humhU-bu [Bombus Iwrlorum, A., 5), ntractid (after Herm. Mullen. (I) Head seen from below, (a) The same seen from the side iwith proboscis directed somewhat down- wards), ant, antennae. Other references as in Fig. 64- Some of these ' cuckoo-bees' (Apathus, or Psithyrus) have almost the same develop- ment of hairs as their parent-stock (Bombus), from which H. Miiller concludes that they acquired the habit of brood-parasitism in comparatively recent times. Others again, in which the transition to this mode of life took place very long ago (Coelioxys, Epeolus, Nomada, Stelis), have in the course of time
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