On each of her fore-legs the bee has an appliance which fulfils a very important office. It is a semicircular notch with a fringe of strong hairs, and when the leg is bent up, this notch engages with a curious projection on the next upper joint, forming an eyelet roughly circular in shape. With this exact and special tool she cleans her antennæ, and this is done at short intervals throughout the whole active time of her life, much as, in the operation of winking, the human eye is kept cleansed. The tongue also is freed from adhering grains of pollen by this device. The question, How does a bee gather the flower-juices to make her honey? is met by certain popular naturalists with the assurance that she sucks them through a tube. This is so easy a generalisation that it amounts very nearly to positive error. The tongue of the bee is not a tube, as the word is usually understood. And she laps up the nectar as often as she sucks it. It depends entirely on the quantity to be dealt with; and a little careful dissection of the mouth-parts of the bee, by means of the microscope and a pair of long needles, will soon make the whole matter clear. She is no beauty—the honey-bee, seen at such close quarters; unending toil, and a perverted, baffled nature, do not tend to loveliness in any of her sex. But her positive and almost terrifying ugliness, when looked at so disadvantageously, is soon forgotten as one comes to realise her abounding possession of that other kind of beauty—the beauty of utility. To the naked eye her tongue is a bright brown, shining piece, protruding from her mouth, and hanging down with much the same appearance as an elephant’s trunk. Under the microscope it is soon seen that this is not a tongue in the proper sense, but a continuation of the under-lip. It consists of six or seven different parts capable of being fitted together lengthways. There is a central part, longer than the rest, with a hairy spatula at its end, and when the other parts are closed about this, the whole virtually forms a tube within a tube. The spatula does the lapping when only minute quantities of fluid have to be taken up, and these pass into the mouth more by capillary attraction than by actual sucking; but when there is a brimming cup of nectar to be emptied, the whole mechanism of the tongue is brought into play. The longitudinal strips are placed together edge to edge, and the liquid is drawn out of the flower-cup by the action of the tongue-muscles in much the same way as water is lifted by a pump.