Fritz Müller on Flowers and Insects

Abstract

THE enclosed letter from that excellent observer, Fritz Müller, contains some miscellaneous observations on certain plants and insects of South Brazil, which are so new and curious that they will probably interest your naturalist readers. With respect to his case of bees getting their abdomens dusted with pollen while gnawing the glands on the calyx of one of the Malpighiaceæ, and thus effecting the cross-fertilisation of the flowers, I will remark that this case is closely analogous to that of Coronilla recorded by Mr. Farrer in your journal some years ago, in which parts of the flowers have been greatly modified, so that bees may act as fertilisers while sucking the secretion on the outside of the calyx. The case is interesting in another way. My son Francis has shown that the food bodies of the Bull's-horn Acacia, which are consumed by the ants that protect the tree from its enemies (as described by Mr. Belt), consist of modified glands; and he suggests that aboriginally the ants licked a secretion from the glands, but that at a subsequent period the glands were rendered more nutritious and attractive by the retention of the secretion and other changes, and that they were then devoured by the ants. But my son could advance no case of glands being thus gnawed or devoured by insects, and here we have an example.