True Bees — Part 1

(Super-family Apoidea)

This great group, comprising about five thousand species, includes all of the true bees, both the honey-gatherers which have social communities and live a strict community life, and the solitary bees. We have already seen in the table of super-families that the hind feet of these insects are dilated or thickened, and that the hairs of the head and thorax are feathery. These peculiar feathery hairs are found only in the true bees, which also differ from other Hymenoptera by the peculiar modification of the mouth-parts which are lengthened into a structure which is almost like a proboscis. It is a very conspicuous organ and is fitted in many of them for probing deep flowers and for gathering nectar. The mandibles or upper jaws play no part in this proboscis-like structure, which is composed entirely of lower lip and lower jaws, both greatly lengthened.

The eggs of all bees are laid in cells of one kind or another in which the larvae develop. Sometimes they are fed by the adult bees and sometimes a supply of food is stored in the cell so that after the egg is laid and the cell is completely closed the mother has no more responsibilty for the growth and development of her offspring.

It is among the higher and more specialized bees that we see for the first time the extraordinary community life which is developed among them and certain other Hymenoptera, such as certain social wasps and ants, and practically nowhere else, except among the so-called white ants or Termites, which belong to quite a different order. With the social bees we find a most perfect communism; each individual works for the good of the community, and thus only indirectly for its own ends.

In the evolution of this community life strange things have happened. There has come to be a class of individuals which are practically sexless, and are called neuters or workers. These individuals do the mechanical work of the community. They are really structurally females in which the development of the sexual organs has ceased at a certain point. They are undeveloped and infertile females. The other two sexes are represented, but the number of true females, or queens as they are called, is small, only a sufficient number being found to supply eggs for the perpetuation of the community. The males are aptly termed drones, since they are drones in comparison with the active and hard-working neuters or workers. Their function in the community is simply to fertilize the queens at the proper time, and then they are of no further use in the world.

The Apoidea are now subdivided into no less than fourteen fullfledged families. These include the Apidae, or true honey bees, the Bombidae, or bumblebees, the solitary bees of the Anthophoridae, the cuckoo bees of the family Nomadidae, the small carpenter bees of the family Ceratinidae, the large carpenter bees of the family Xylocopidae, the mason, leaf-cutting and potter bees of the family Megachilidae, the parasitic bees of the family Stelidae, the sharp-tongued burrowing bees of the family Andrenidae; the blunt-tongued burrowing bees of the family Colletidae, and others.

The habits of the bees of these diverse families vary greatly, and most of the characteristics which they have in common have already been referred to. All, from their flower-visiting habits, are of great importance in the cross fertilization of plants, and without their aid the health of the plant world would suffer and its infinite variety would hardly have been achieved.

The most famous of all bees is naturally the common honey bee, an importation from Europe, not a native, which by the hand of man has become a true domesticated animal. The life history of this creature has been so often written about and may so easily be learned by consulting any encyclopedia or standard general work of reference that it does not seem necessary to describe it in detail here. The methods of bee culture in use admit of ready study of its economy. (One of the strongest bits of descriptive writing known to me is Tolstoi's description of a queenless bee hive, in "War and Peace," where he likens Moscow on the approach of the French army to a hive deserted by the queen bee.) In this brief summary of the general characteristics of bees we shall, therefore, confine ourselves to the wild and less known forms. A bumblebee has been selected for the typical life history, and little need therefore be said of the large and important family to which that species belongs, except to state that bumblebees now occur in most parts of the world, and that they are especially abundant in temperate and even boreal regions, large numbers inhabiting far northern localities where they abound in the brief artic summer, and where they live a short but extremely busy life on account of the crowding together of the flowering periods of sub-polar plants.