Early travellers and historians describe many kinds of honey made by these bees, native to the South American continent, but they report nothing of the peculiarities of the social economy of these insects, nor whether they are as closely allied in this respect to Apis, as they are in the collection of honey and wax.
To enter into further detail relative to them would be beyond the province of this work, and I have only given this extremely superficial and brief notice of foreign genera, to show what multitudes of others of this interesting family await admiration and study, when some proficiency has been acquired in the knowledge of our own.
CHAPTER V
PARASITES OF BEES AND THEIR ENEMIES.
Nature seems to have imposed a restraint upon the undue increase of all its creatures, by creating, to check it, others that prey upon them. It thus enlarges the sphere of its activity by making life accessory to life, and promoting thereby a more extended enjoyment of all its pleasures. Other forms are brought into existence, and other terms given to duration than those which the laws of life attach to specific organization. No abatement is thereby made upon the quantity of contemporaneous vitality, for what subsides in one rises in another, and the undulation of the waves is perpetual.
Does the quantity of life, extant upon the earth, vary? Perhaps mortality ever comes in some shape to prevent it, when excess threatens to render its energy effete. Yet under every circumstance the wise arrangements of Providence suffice, for everything has its enemies or its parasites, which are also enemies, but frequently in disguise. For defence there is an implanted instinctive fear, or abhorrence; and the creature is then left to its skill, prudence, or strength, either to evade or to mitigate, to the extent of its capability, the danger of the attack.
We find the bees are not at all exempted from this prevailing condition. They have many enemies and parasites of remarkably differing organization. They are attacked by many kinds of birds, among which the Merops Apiaster (or bee-eater) is conspicuous. All the swallow tribe prey upon them, as do the shrikes and some of the soft-billed small birds, and also many small quadrupeds when they can find the opportunity. Wasps also attack them, but they do not often get entangled in spiders’ nets, being generally too strong for the retention of its meshes, but I have seen a Bombus enveloped in a tangle of its wonderful filament.
The wild bees’ parasites are of two kinds, personal, and such which, like the young of cuckoos, live at the expense of the offspring. The personal parasites are again of two kinds, for bees are infested with several kinds of Acari, and once I found a Bombus upon the ground in Coombe Wood so swarming with the Acarus that it lay hopelessly helpless until I threw it into a pool of water, when its attachés were washed away. But the poor bee seemed so prostrated by their attack, that even when freed from them it had not energy to fly, and having landed it I left it to the kindly nursing of nature.
A little yellow hexapod larva sometimes also infests the wild bees in great numbers, running over and about them with great activity. I have never followed these to their development, but they are said to be the larvæ of Meloe proscarabæus, a conspicuously large coleopterous insect. The assertion has produced much discussion; and I believe the larva has been bred to the imago, and consequently it has been proved that it is the larva of that insect. But that it should be parasitical upon so small a creature, and that numbers should infest it for their nutriment, is extremely improbable. It is far more likely that instinct has taught them to be conveyed elsewhere through the medium of the bee, as they might also be by attaching themselves to any other volatile insect, and that upon arriving at a suitable locality they descend from their temporary hippogriff. We see seeds thus conveyed by the agency of animals and birds to suitable places, where they fall and germinate.
Another little hexapod is occasionally found upon them: this is intensely black, and like the former, very active: these I never could rear, nor did they ever seem to enlarge, and they speedily died. I have found them in profusion also within the flowers of syngenesious or composite plants, especially of the dandelion in the spring.