Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 02.djvu/760

BEDSTRAW. Canada; and those of Galium boreale, another Korth American species, used by some of the Indian tribes. Like madder, they possess the property of imparting a red color to the bones and milk of animals which feed upon them. Medicinal virtues have been ascribed to some of the species, as Qalinm rigidum and Galium mol- higo, which have been extolled as useful in epi- lepsy. The roasted seeds of some, as Galium aparine, the troublesome goosegrass, or cleav- ers of England — remarkable for the hooked prickles of its stem, leaves, and fruit — have been recommended as a substitute for coffee ; but it does not appear that they contain any principle analogous to caffeine. This plant is a native of the northern parts of Europe, Asia, and America. Its expressed juice is in some coimtries a popular remedy for cutaneous disor- ders. The roots of Galium tuberosum are fari- naceous, and it is cultivated in China for food. The name bedstraw is supposed to be derived from the ancient employment of some of the species, the herbage of which is soft and fine, for strewing beds.

BEE (commonly explained as 'the trembler,' from the root bhl, to fear; AS. bed, Ger. Bierre). Any hymenopterous insect of the group Apoidea. This group (the Linnnean 'genus Apis,' and until recently regarded as the single family Apidas, or at most two families, Apidae and Andrenidce) com])rises those Hpnenoptera which have the hind feet dilated or thickened, the hairs of the head and thorax feathery, and the tongue adapt- ed to lapping the nectar of flowers.

Bees stand, in organization and intelligence, and in social and constructive abilities, at the head of the whole insect tribe; they abound in all parts of the world, but are most numerous in the warmer latitudes; about 5000 species are known to science; they exert a most important influence upon the vegetable world by their ser- vices in the cross-fertilization of plants, some of which now depend wholly upon their cooperation for their existence; and they furnish mankind with the important food honey, some species be- ing semi-domesticated for the purpose of m.aking it in large and manageable quantities for man's benefit.

Habits. All bees feed, when adult, on saccha- rine juices, particularly the noctar of flowers ; but the iarvte are fed by their elders on 'bee-bread,' which consists of the pollen of flowers collected by the bees and made into small masses. They begin their search with the opening of flowers in the spring, and do not cease it until the wither- ing of the last blossoms in the fall compel the insects to desist and to go into winter quarters, where the social species have stored a supply of honey in a series of small waxen chambers or 'cells,' combined into 'combs,' upon which they subsist until spring, while the solitary species, which do not lay up such stores, mostly die ; but their larva-, snugly placed in burrows, or other concealed or parasitic situations, remain quies- cent until the return of warm weather, when they emerge. These remarks apply to the colder climates; in the tropics winter is not to be feared, but extensive droughts must be provided against. It is the habit of bees to devote their searching to a single sort of flower as long as it serves their purpose, each individual visiting blossom after blossom of that kind, instead of searching flowers indiscriminately; and to this habit is due the great service they accomplish in cross-fertilization. See Pollination.

Fecdinrj. — To enable them (or such, here- after described, as do this work) to reach their liquid food in the nectaries, usually at the bot- tom of tube-like flowers, the bees have developed to the highest degree the prolonged mouth-parts or 'proboscis' characteristic of hj-menopterans, and the extensile ligula or 'tongue' is haiiy, and terminates in a little spoon like part, by which the nectar is brushed or lapped out of its recep- tacles and conveyed into the mouth. Here it is partly swallowed into a dilatation of the oesoph- agus, analogous to a bird's crop, and called the 'crop' or 'lioney-bag,' where it is 'ripened' into honey (q.v. ). Wlien enough has been obtained, it is disgorged either as food for those of the com- munity which remain at home in the nest, or to be stored in the comb-cells of those species which lay up winter stores. The mouth of bees is also employed for cutting and tearing, and to this purpose their upper jaws are especially adapted. The bumblebees thus open their way into the tubes of flowers which are so deep and narrow that they cannot otherwise reach the nectar at the bottom. Others make use of their mandibles to cut out portions of leaves, or of the petals of flowers, to form or line their nests; the hive bee uses them in working with wax, in feeding larvae with pollen, in cleaning out cells, in tear- ing to pieces old combs, in combats, and in all the great variety of purposes for which organs of prehension are required.

But it is not by means of any of the organs connected with the mouth that bees collect and carry to their nests the supplies of pollen need- ful for their young. The feathered hairs with which their bodies are partly clothed, and par- ticularly those with which their legs are fur- nished, serve for the purpose of collecting the pollen, which adheres to them, and it is brushed into a hollow on the outer surface of the first joint of the tarsus of each of the hinder pair of legs, this joint being therefore very large, com- pressed, and of a square or triangular form — a conformation to which nothing similar is found in any other family of insects. This hollow re- ceptacle is known as the corbiculum or "pollen basket' ; and in the social bees it is possessed only by the workers, since the perfect males (drones) and females (queens) never collect pollen.

Faculties. — Bees possess a very high development of the nervous s.ystem, brain, and senses. The great compound eyes, as well as the ocelli, characteristic of the higher hymenopterans, are here as highly developed as anywhere — perhaps higher — and bees depend greatly upon their eyes for information, observing carefully the situa- tion of their home or any other ]ilace to which they may wish to return when leaving it for the first time, then rising in higher and larger circles until they catch sight of some landmark, when they strike straight toward it through the air; hence' the proverbial phra,se, 'a bee-line.' Their visual sense of form and color must be well advanced also, and the bearing of this upon the development of color and form in blossoms is a matter of very curious interest and of much importance in the history of the mutual development of these insects and the plants they fre-