liquids through their proboscides. Being in a state of civilization,
their food must be administered in a civilized way: it must be boiled
for them. They fancy stimulants; and sugar dissolved in ale, old brown
October, or, better still, made into a rich sirup with Port wine, they
find very delectable. Those authors who regard pollen as a part of their
subsistence deem that it is because they require nitrogenized
substances; and in order to prove that it is used as food, they remark
that the bees continue to harvest it so long as a single flower blows,
and that entirely after the formation of the cells has ceased. This,
however, may be owing simply to the instinct which prompted them in the
first place to bring it home, as instinct is generally in all creatures
stronger than reason and overloaded; and that it cannot be any portion
of the food of bees seems evident from the fact that whole hives are
known to have perished by hunger while still abundantly supplied with
bee-bread, as the pollen is often called. It is more probable that
pollen is really the chief constituent of wax, although Huber submits
that honey has that honor; but that this wax is produced in the manner
that Huber states is extremely doubtful. It is his opinion that the
wax-workers, having first gorged themselves with honey, suspend
themselves in festoons from the flowers, where they remain for
twenty-four hours,--which in a chilly spring night would break many a
link of the chain,--after which, one detaches herself from the festoon,
enters the hive, and takes up her situation, with her forceps detaches a
scale of wax from her side where it has recently exuded, works it with
her tongue, and fashions it to the required consistency, succeeded in
turn by others, artisan and apprentice. But as honey is the normal and
established food of bees, it would follow that these scales must be in a
state of perpetual exudation, and thus before long the hive would become
filled with them, unless bees have a control of their bodily secretions
enjoyed by no other order of beings. Anatomical dissection has found
pollen only in the second stomach of the bee, of which the mouth is the
sole and single opening; it is therefore presumed, that, being taken in
a crude condition, and having undergone its due elaboration there, it is
disgorged again and becomes the wax of the cells. This was the opinion
of Reaumur; and for additional proof, it is stated, that, though the
workers a