If the drop of syrup presented to the bee be thicker, or if it meet with a drop of honey, it then thrusts the anterior portion of its tongue into the liquid, but apparently only to use it as a dog might do its tongue in lapping milk or water. Even in the drop of honey the bee bends the end of its tongue about, and lengthens and shortens it successively, and, indeed, withdraws it from moment to moment. We then observe it not merely lengthen and shorten this end, but it is also seen to curve it about, causing from time to time the superior surface to become concave,—to give, as it were, to the liquid with which it is loaded a downward inclination towards the head. In fact, this portion of the trunk appears to act as a tongue, and not as a pump. Indeed its extremity, where the aperture for receiving the liquid is assumed to be, is repeatedly above the surface of the liquid which the insect is lapping. By these continuous motions this anterior extremity of the tongue charges itself with the nectareous fluid, and conveys it to the mouth. It is along the upper surface of this pilose tongue that the liquid passes. The bee strives especially to load and cover it with honey. In shortening the tongue to the extent, sometimes, of withdrawing it entirely beneath its sheaths, it conveys and deposits the liquid with which it is charged within a sort of channel, formed by the upper surface of the tongue and the sheaths which fold over it. Thus, these sheaths are, perhaps, less for the purpose of covering the tongue than to form and cover the channel by which the liquid is conveyed to the mouth. I have previously remarked that the trunk can swell and contract; these swellings and constrictions are observed to succeed each other, and may be for the purpose of urging the liquid, already in transit beneath the sheaths, forward towards the true mouth. Further, I moved the sheaths aside from their position above the tongue of a bee which I held in my fingers, and I succeeded, by means of the point of a pin, in placing an extremely small drop of honey upon the tongue of this bee at a spot where it could be covered by the extremities of the external sheath. I then let these sheaths loose. Sometimes they spontaneously resumed their previous position, and sometimes I assisted them to resume it. The drop of honey which they then covered has in no instance returned to the extremity of the tongue; it has always passed towards the mouth, and doubtless entered that orifice itself. It is therefore very certain that the bee imbibes its honey by lapping, and that it never passes through the aperture which has been supposed to have been seen at the extreme apex of the tongue. Did this aperture really exist, it would be of extreme minuteness, and it did not appear to me possible that a large drop of honey, which I have seen imbibed in a very few instants, could in so short a time have passed by so minute an opening.