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. But their most remarkable personal parasites consist of some very extraordinary insects, so anomalous in their structure as to have required the construction of an order for their reception,—the Order _Strepsiptera_, or “twisted-winged,” thus named from the twist taken by their anterior wings or wing-cases. Their natural history is but imperfectly known, and I believe the males have not yet been discovered. Their larva lives within the bee, and feeds on its viscera by absorption, being attached within by a sort of umbilical cord. It presently consumes the viscera, and renders the bee abortive, by destroying its ovaries, for it is usually upon female bees that it is found. When full fed it forms a case within which it changes into the pupa and imago, the head of which case protrudes between the scales of one of the dorsal segments of the abdomen. How it becomes deposited within the bee or the bee’s larva remains a mystery, although many hypotheses have been hazarded to account for it, but all are unsatisfactory. The Order consists of three genera (_Stylops_, _Elenchus_, and _Halictophagus_) found in England, and other parts of Europe; indeed, the genus _Elenchus_ has been also discovered in the Mauritius. The Continent possesses the genus _Xenos_, of the same order, and parasitical upon a wasp, neither of which occur with us.