George Herbert Carpenter and William Broughton Carr

“ The number of workers increases largely during the summer, and so hard do the insects work that the life of an individual may last only a few weeks. On the approach of winter the males, having no further function to perform for the community, are refused food-supplies by the workers, and are either excluded or banished from the hive to perish. Such ruthless habits of the bee-commonwealth, no less than the altruistic labours of the workers, are adapted for the survival and dominance of the species. ”

“ The differentiation of queen and workers is correlated with the habit of storing food supplies, and the consequent permanence of the community, which finds relief for its surplus population by sending off a swarm, consisting of a queen and a number of workers, so that the new community is already specialized both for reproduction and for labour. ”

“ The most highly developed of the long-tongued bees are “social” species, in which the females are differentiated into egg-laying queens and (usually) infertile “workers” (fig. 6) . Verhoeff has discussed the rise of the “social” from the “solitary” condition, and points out that for the formation of an insect community three conditions are necessary—a nest large enough for a number of individuals, a close grouping of the cells, and an association between mother and daughters in the winged state. ”

“ If the unfinished cell in the old nest had been only just begun, while that in the substituted nest were nearly completed, the bee would add so much material as to make the cell much larger than the normal size, her instinct evidently being to do a certain amount of building work before filling the cell with food. ”

“ All young grubs are at first fed with a specially nutritious food, discharged from the worker’s stomach, to which is added a digestive secretion derived from special salivary glands in the worker’s head. ”

“ Dickel states that a German male bee mated with a female of the Italian race transmits distinct paternal characters to hybrid male offspring. A. Weismann, however, doubts these conclusions, and having found a spermaster in every one of the eggs that he examined from worker-cells, and in only one out of 272 eggs taken from drone-cells, he supports Dzierzon’s view, explaining the single exception mentioned above as a mistake of the queen, she having laid inadvertently this single fertilized egg in a drone instead of in a worker cell. ”

“ If the species of Nomada attack the species of Andrena too much, it brings about the destruction of its own species more certainly than that of the Andrena.”
More violent in its methods is the larva of a Stelis, whose operations in the nest of Osmia leucomelana have been studied by Verhoeff. The female Stelis lays her eggs earlier than the Osmia, and towards the bottom of the food-mass; the egg of the Osmia is laid later, and on the surface of the food. ”

“ The successive cuticles that are cast as growth proceeds are delicate in texture and sometimes separate from the underlying cuticle without being stripped off. The maggots may pass no excrement from the intestine until they have eaten all their store of food. ”