We may be the more excused for this preference when we weigh the interest of the genus _Apis_ to man. The wasp boots us nothing, but is the pilferer of our fruits, and a marauder upon the hive, whose inhabitants it destroys and consumes their produce, it being indifferent to them which they obtain—the bee or the honey,—either furnishing them with sustenance. The ant is obtrusive and incommodious, making incursions upon the pantry, the store-room, the green-house, and the hothouse; disfiguring our flower-beds, and often disgusting us with our aliment by the impertinent intrusion of its appearance. But the bee stores up for us honey, whose cruses are as inexhaustible as the oil cruse of the good widow of Zarephath, and whose waxen shards furnish us with a beautifully soft light, which in Catholic worship adds solemnity to the rites of religion. In doing this the bee fulfils a sovereign function in the economy of nature, by the fertilization of the flowering plants, with which she reciprocates benefits; the preponderance, however, is importantly in favour of the flower. If captious objectors should dispute the position we thus claim for the bees, we will willingly leave them the wasp with its sting, whilst we sedulously cultivate the active and industrious bee, whose associations range through all the fields of poetry, but nowhere more lusciously than in the beautiful compositions of the Sanskrit poets Kalidasa and Yayadeva. The position of the family, whose English constituents I shall subsequently treat of, being thus fixed, I have next to explain the several subdivisions into which it is divided in the following arrangement. I am prompted to propose this new distribution of the British bees, by the manifest imperfection of the several arrangements of them already extant. The defects of these systems I shall have occasion to exhibit in reference to the course I have been induced to take. Mr. Kirby’s keenness of observation led him to surmise, from the absence of polliniferous brushes upon the posterior legs, or other parts of the body of some, that there might be a class of bees analogous to the cuckoo, amongst the birds, who did not rear their own young, or undertake any of the cares of maternity; but that led by a peculiar instinct they deposited their eggs in the nests of more laborious kinds, for their young to be nurtured upon the provision laid up in store by the latter for the supply of their own progeny. This being merely a supposition, Mr. Kirby made no use of it in the distribution of his families. Observation has since confirmed the conjecture, and the fact lends material aid to the combination of the bees into detached groups, and which has been partially applied since by all systematizers.