With the great John Ray dawns the scientific cultivation of British bees. Before his time, the only entomological work which had been published in England was Dr. Mouffett’s ‘Theatrum Insectorum.’ In this work there is an ample account of the domestic bee, with gleanings from many sources of some of its habits and economy, but there is no notice of any insects, excepting some species of the genus Bombus, which may be at all consorted with the social bee by affinities of structure or identity of function.

In Ray’s correspondence with his disciples and friends, we have straggling observations upon the habits of a few wild bees, especially some jotted down by his diligent pupil, the distinguished Francis Willughby. It is in Ray’s posthumous ‘Historia Insectorum,’ published in 1710, at the instance of the Royal Society, that we first find collected together all that had been previously known of ‘British Bees.’ In that work he describes them systematically. He there arranges the bees into Apis and Bombylius, which may be regarded almost as genera.

He divides Apis into what may be considered as two sections, Apis domestica forming the first, and the second containing his Apes silvestres, or wild bees. Nine of these are described and numbered consecutively, which are followed by eleven descriptions unnumbered, some of the latter having been supplied to him by Francis Willughby, whose initials are attached to these, and amongst which we find the description of the willow bee, subsequently, from this cause, named by Kirby, from its original describer, and now universally known as Megachile Willughbiella.

Ray’s second genus is Bombylius, identical, as far as it goes, with the modern genus Bombus, excepting that it includes an Anthophora. He here describes nineteen, all numbered. Ray’s names are phrases, the mode of describing then prevalent in all the natural sciences, until the happy introduction of the binomial system by the great genius of natural history—LinnÆus. These phrases are almost tantamount to the modern specific character; but Ray unfortunately attaches no size, yet size might have lent some aid to their modern determination.

Mr. Kirby was able to identify and introduce into his synonymy only a few of Ray’s insects, from the defectiveness of the descriptions; the following embrace all that could be verified:—

No. 1 of the Apes silvestres is our Anthidium mancatum; No. 3, the male of Anthophora retusa, the female of which being No. 4 of his Bombylii; No. 4 of the Apes is Andrena nitida: these comprise all of those numbered which could be recognized. The first of the unnumbered is the male of Eucera longicornis; the fourth is Melecta punctata; the sixth is Colletes fodiens; the seventh is the male of Osmia bicornis; and the ninth the celebrated Megachile Willughbiella.

In Bombylius No. 1 is Bombus lapidarius; No. 2, B. Raiellus, named by Mr. Kirby in honour of its great describer; No. 3 is B. muscorum; No. 4 is the female of Anthophora retusa, as noticed above; No. 5 is Bombus terrestris, as is also No. 6; No. 7 is the male of B. lapidarius; No. 8 is B. pratorum; No. 9 is B. sylvarum; No. 10 is B. subinterruptus; No. 11 is B. hortorum; No. 13 is B. Francillonellus, and No. 17 is Apathus Barbutellus. Thus ten of the Apes silvestres, and six of the Bombylii are unidentified, and those recognized may be placed correctly, by the aid I give in attaching Mr. Kirby’s synonymy to the list of species added to each genus below.

Nothing of any moment thence intervened, until the Rev. W. Kirby, of Barham, in Suffolk, made a careful and earnest collection of the ‘British Bees,’ with a view to their scientific description and distribution. Stragglers were to be found in many entomological cabinets, and some of their habits had been observed and recorded by patient and attentive naturalists; but these collections were small, very imperfect, and widely dispersed, until Mr. Kirby’s energy and activity nurtured the idea, and carried it into execution, of bringing into one focus the scattered notices and vagrant specimens he had seen about.

The diligence he himself exercised in procuring all the individuals he possibly could, by continued collecting during a succession of years, enabled him, in the course of time, to add considerably to those he was already acquainted with, either in collections, or through dispersed notices. The growing bulk of his store suggested his looking around for guides to their methodical arrangement, as a clue to what might have been observed of their habits. Finding no such assistance, and nothing to meet his wants, for LinnÆus’s notices were too few, and Fabricius’s labours too inconsequential, he determined to aid himself by elaborating their distribution upon the basis of the principles established by Fabricius himself, but which this celebrated entomologist had worked out so inconclusively as to make his system an indigested mass heaped together in the greatest disorder.

Mr. Kirby’s patience and diligence, although working only upon the same principle, speedily brought into lucidity and order the obscurity and confusion that had prevailed. By one of those strange coincidences which have been remarkably recurrent in scientific invention and discovery, Latreille, in France, was at the same time arranging all the bees known to him, by a process precisely similar to that adopted by Mr. Kirby. He consequently arrived at exactly the same results, with this difference only, that what Mr. Kirby calls genera are to Latreille subfamilies, and the sections which Mr. Kirby was induced to form in his genera, from their structural differences, and which sections he called families, inconveniently indicating them merely by letters, asterisks, and numbers, were formed by Latreille into genera, and to which the latter either applied or adopted names, or framed new ones, when deficient; these however are essentially genera, with all their discriminative characteristics, for they bring together the very same species in both cases. This clearly exhibits the beauty and certainty of the principle upon which each had worked out his distribution, both being based chiefly upon the structure of the trophi, or the organs of the mouth, but which Fabricius, its projector, had, singularly enough, failed to accomplish successfully.

Both works were published in the same year, 1802 (An X. of Latreille’s book), unknown to each other, but Mr. Kirby’s sprang into life in matured perfection, like the imago of the bee itself, whereas Latreille’s labours were progressively nursed to maturity in successive publications, until they received their final elaboration in 1809, in the fourth volume of his ‘Genera Crustaceorum et Insectorum,’ whose successive stages were, first, the notice appended at the end of his ‘Histoire des Fourmis’ in Paris in 1801, and then in the thirteenth volume of his ‘Histoire Naturelle des Insectes,’ in 1805, a supplement to Sonnini’s edition of Buffon, and then in the ‘Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Histoire Naturelle.’ Even thus the subject was not so amply discussed, although applied more extensively, and made to embrace all the bees, exotic as well as European, at that time known, as it had been done in Mr. Kirby’s model work, which leaves nothing to be desired but the naming of his anonymous subdivisions, and a little more artistical skill in the execution of his plates. The terminology used by him also differs from that subsequently adopted through foreign influences, but which is readily reduced to his standard.

The merits of the work greatly transcend these trivial deficiencies, for it is a “canon” as invaluable to the entomologist as the celebrated canon of Polycletus was, and the Phidian marbles still are to sculptors. Of course observation has greatly reduced the number of his species by their due association with legitimate partners, which, from their dissimilarity, he was compelled to separate, as only successive observation could prove their identity. More extensive collecting has also shown that some of his species are merely varieties of others, which have thus been brought to their authentic type. This also could only be proved by experience, for it is remarkable how very Protean some species are, whilst others are almost rigidly unchangeable. Evidently there does exist a line of demarcation between distinct species, which only requires to be diligently sought to be found, obscure as it may appear to be, but which the insects themselves obey, for however closely species may sometimes approximate, yet I do not believe, as I have before expressed, that they ever permanently coalesce, and that they are always as distinctly separate as are asymptotes.

As Mr. Kirby’s work is in few hands, or perhaps not readily accessible, I will give here a summary outline of it, with the names of the genera with which his families coincide.

In this work he established only two named genera—Melitta and Apis.

His genus Melitta, which is equivalent to the subsequent subfamily AndrenidÆ, he divides into two sections, * and * *, the first containing two families, a and b, (these we call genera, and they are now named Colletes and Prosopis); the second section * * contains three families, a, b, c, (a, is Sphecodes, b, Halictus, and c comprises our three genera, Andrena, Cilissa, and Dasypoda.)

His genus Apis he also divides into two sections, * and * *; the first is subdivided into two families, a and b (our genera Panurgus and Nomada); and the second is divided into five subsections, a, b, c, d, e; a and b constitute families (our genera Melecta and Epeolus). The subsection c is divided into two parts, 1 and 2, the first containing the two divisions a and , each comprising a family (our genera Coelioxys and Stelis); and the second is divided into the four families, a, , ?, d, (a being the modern Megachile; , Anthidium; ?, Chelostoma and Heriades conjunctively, and d is our Osmia). The subsection d has two subdivisions, 1 and 2, the first being a family (our Eucera); and the second is divided into the two families a and (a comprising our Saropoda, Anthophora, and Ceratina), and the family , consisting of the genus Xylocopa, then supposed to be indigenous, but whose native occurrence has not been substantiated.

The fifth subsection, e, is split into two divisions, 1 and 2, each containing a family (1 is our Apis, and 2, our Bombus).

In this last of his families Mr. Kirby had already noticed, with the same sagacity with which he had previously conjectured the cuckoo-like habits of some of the solitary bees, the distinctive structure of some of the species, which incapacitated them from providing the sustenance of their own young, and which thus reduced them to the same category; but he left the idea in its supposititious condition, being too modest to use it as a mark of separation, but which Newman, on our side of the Channel, and St. Fargeau on the other side, subsequently, and both nearly about the same time, but with the advantage in favour of Newman, distinguished, and separated generically, respectively by the names of Apathus and Psithyrus; the former, having the priority, is adopted, according to the rights of precedence in nomenclature.

The above description of Mr. Kirby’s system will perhaps be difficult to understand, unless I append the naked scheme itself, which is as follows:—