THE BEES WITH POINTED TONGUES
All the genera, except the two mentioned in the last chapter, belong to this section, which comprises a variety of very different styles of bees, beginning with the short spear-shape-tongued species and ascending to the long-tongued species, which are considered to culminate in the hive bee. The habits of these genera vary very greatly in some respects; special notice has been or will be given of Halictus ([pl. B], 12) and Sphecodes ([B], 11), Andrena ([B], 15, 16), Nomada ([B], 18) and the other cuckoos, Osmia ([D], 28) and Anthophora ([D], 24, 25) and the leaf-cutting bees, but there are several other genera which deserve a passing notice, although their habits are not so peculiar as those of the specially selected ones. Cilissa, which is a very close ally of Andrena, is peculiar in having the hairs of the tongue erect and arranged almost in bottle-brush fashion. Its habits are much like those of
Andrena. Dasypoda, so called on account of the enormously long hairs of the pollen brushes of the legs in the female, is one of our most beautiful bees; it is of moderate size, a little more than half an inch long, with a brown haired thorax, and a black body with white apical bands on the segments; the hind legs are rather unusually long and the brush is composed of very long bright fulvous hairs, and when the bee returns home laden with pollen it is, as F. Smith says, "sufficiently singular to attract the attention of the most apathetic observer." It burrows in sandy places much after the fashion of Andrena, etc. The male is a different looking insect, entirely covered with yellowish hairs. Panurgus ([pl. B], 17) is a curious genus of coal-black bees, whose females have bright yellow pollen brushes on their hind legs; they visit yellow composite flowers and the males often sleep curled up amongst their rays; they are most active bees, and burrow generally in hard pathways. I was watching a large colony of one of the species near Chobham in the end of June—they were burrowing in a gravel path, under which the soil was of a black sandy nature; the path was scattered all over with little black
hillocks of sand, and seemed alive with bees. It was showery weather, and occasionally the hillocks were washed nearly flat and a lot of sand must have entered their burrows—however, as soon as the sun came out again they cleaned out their holes and returned to their work. Panurgus is most businesslike in its pollen collecting; it flies in a rapid headlong way into a flower, and seems to do its best to bury itself, with a remarkable amount of action as if it was in a great hurry, and often bustles out of it again almost immediately and goes on to the next. Its methods suggest that it does more work in five minutes than any other bee would do in ten.
Another genus, Anthidium ([pl. D], 27), this time one of the long-tongued bees, is peculiar in having the male larger than the female. Both sexes are black, variegated with yellow markings and spots, but the male is more ornate in this respect than the female and also has a peculiarly shaped body, which is unusually flat, curving downwards towards the apex, which is armed with five teeth, two bent ones on the sixth segment and three on the seventh. The female collects pollen on the underside of its body and collects the
down off the stems of various plants, especially those of the dead nettle or "labiate" tribe, with which it invests its cells. I cannot do better than quote the following from F. Smith: "This is the social bee which White in his History of Selbourne has so well described in the following words: 'There is a sort of wild bee frequenting the Garden Campion for the sake of its tomentum, which probably it turns to some purpose in the business of nidification. It is very pleasant to see with what address it strips off the pubes running from the top to the bottom of a branch and shaving it bare with the dexterity of a hoop shaver; when it has got a vast bundle, almost as large as itself, it flies away, holding it secure between its chin and fore legs.'"