is preserved in the collection of the Rev. F. W. Hope. X. latipes is likewise an eastern insect. "According to Mr. Smeathman, these bees are very injurious to wooden houses, the posts of which they bore and perforate in various directions, so as to weaken them very much; the holes they make are half an inch in diameter. Drury hazards the conjecture, that the curiously dilated anterior tarsi, and the long hairs with which they are furnished, appear to be useful to the creature for containing the substance of which these insects compose their nests. This, however, is but mere conjecture, since it is the males only that possess this curious construction, and this sex takes no share in the construction or provisioning of the nest in any species of bees with whose economy we are hitherto acquainted."[1]
Having given these details respecting foreign species, most of them bearing some affinity to the Bombinatrices, we now return to the kinds more closely related to the Hive-Bee, which alone have been subjected to an assured domestication. In Europe we have two distinct species of domestic honey-bees. Besides the one commonly cultivated, viz., the Apis mellifica, which has extended itself over the greater part of the European Continent, is met with even in Barbary, and has now been naturalized in the extensive wastes and prairies of North America,—the Apis Ligustica of Spinola, A. Ligurienne of Latreille, (See Pl. XXIV.,) is cultivated with success in Italy, and is probably the same
- ↑ Drury's Illust., Westwood's ed., vol. ii. p. 98.
