The genus APIS, or the HIVE BEE,—which perhaps in its past and present utility to man, may successfully compete in the aggregate with the silkworm,—with true regal dignity comes the last of the series of genera. The whole array of her precursors, who marshal her way, and derive their significance and importance from the more or less direct resemblance in structure and function to her, deduce their common name of “Bees” from this relationship, and consequently from her. Long before their existence had been traced by the observer of nature or by the naturalist, the comb of the BEE had dropped in exuberant luxuriance its golden stores for the gratification of mankind. This little creature had garnered, from sources inaccessible to man, the luscious nectar concealed within the bosom of the flower, whose exquisitely beautiful varieties, in form, colour, and fragrance, had delighted his sight and his smell long before he had been led by accident to discover that these industrious little workers collected into their treasury, from those same flowers, as exquisite a luxury for his taste, as they themselves had yielded to his other senses. Thus the earliest records speak of honey, and of bees, and of wax; and the land of promise to the restored Israelites, was to be a land flowing with milk and honey. Réaumur, whose observations upon bees had been pursued with such patient and indefatigable perseverance, combined with such minute accuracy, and then recorded so agreeably, and who conceived the possibility of establishing a standard of length, for the common use of all nations, to be derived from the length of a certain number of the honey-cells of the comb, to which notion he was doubtless led by their mathematical precision and uniform exactitude, appears to have been unaware of the existence of other species of the genus, and hence he assumed, in his ignorance of this fact, that in all countries they were alike. Travellers had, even for more than a century before, mentioned different kinds of honey, derived from different kinds of bees, which, however, Réaumur does not, from this circumstance, seem to have known. Had he been acquainted with it, his philosophical accuracy of observation and habit of reflection would certainly have assumed the possibility of differences of size in the cells of the different bees, and he would have waited until opportunity had given him the power of determining whether this mode of admeasurement could be safely adopted as certainly being of universal prevalence. It is to be wondered at also, that he did not weigh the possibility that climatic differences in the distribution of even the _Apis_ _mellifica_ might have involved discrepancies, by the effects constantly seen to be produced by climate, and which would have shown that the standard which he sought to establish could not be relied on.