them by longer or shorter flights, according to the greater or lesser distance of the object of pursuit. If its followers lag behind, it returns with manifest impatience, and by its redoubled cries appears to chide their delay. As it approaches the tree, its flights become more limited, its whistle is repeated at shorter intervals, and at last, having brought its associates to the desired spot, it hovers over it for a moment, as if to mark it out distinctly, and then quietly takes up a station at a little distance, waiting the result, and expecting its share of the booty, which it never fails to obtain.
In the island of Madagascar, and the Mauritius, is to be found the Apis Unicolor of Latreille, of a bright shining black, without spots or coloured bands. Its honey, as appears from a specimen brought home by the master of a French vessel, is highly aromatic, and is, while in the cells, or when recently abstracted, of a green colour, but becomes afterwards of a reddish yellow. In these islands, the bee is domesticated; and a French Naturalist, M. de Lanux, has published a memoir on the form of the Madagascar hives—a circumstance which naturally leads to the supposition, that the inhabitants pay considerable attention to the cultivation of this insect.[1]
Knox, in his history of Ceylon, enumerates three kinds of bees found in that island; the first of which bears a close resemblance to the European insect, though, it would seem, by no means so irritable, and which, like those near the Cape of Good Hope, builds
- ↑ Latreille, Obs. de Zool. au voyage de Humboldt.
