Besides the common brown or German bee imported from Europe to this country some time in the seventeenth century and now widely spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific, several other races have been brought here--the Italian in 1860, and later the Egyptian, the Cyprian, the Syrian, the Palestine, the Carniolan (Plate I, figs. 1, 4, and 5), and the Tunisian. Of these the brown or German, the Italian, and, in a few apiaries, the Carniolan bees are probably the only races existing pure in the United States, the others having become more or less hybridized with the brown race or among themselves or their cultivation having been discontinued. It should also be remarked that so few have kept their Carniolans pure that purchasers who wish this race should use caution in their selection or else import their own breeding queens. There are many breeders of Italians from whom good stock can be obtained. Egyptian bees were tried some thirty years ago, but only to a very limited extent, and, as has been the case with Syrians and Palestines imported in 1880, and whose test was more prolonged and general, they were condemned as inferior in temper and wintering qualities to the races of bees already here, it not being thought that these points of inferiority were sufficiently balanced by their greater prolificness and their greater energy in honey collecting. [Illustration: Fig. 4.--Worker cells of common honey bee (_Apis mellifera_); natural size. (Original.)] The Tunisians, for similar reasons and also because they are great collectors of propolis, never became popular, although a persistent attempt was made a few years since to create sale for them under the new name of "Punic bees," the undesirable qualities of the race having previously been made known, under the original name, by the author, who had tested them carefully for several years--a part of the time in Tunis.