Fig. 248.—The head of a bee.
The head of the bee bears two remarkable compound eyes, with three simple ones between them. The antennæ are short. The mouth parts (Fig. 248) are complicated, and adapted for sucking up the honey or sweets of flowers or the juices of fruits. In California, the bees eat fruit as well as honey, and even flesh or meat, in very dry seasons, when flowers are scarce. The abdomen of the bee (Fig. 249) is supplied with a sawlike stinger or dart (Fig. 250) which inflicts a painful and poisonous wound. In general appearance the ordinary honeybee resembles an ant with wings; but the bee is hairy, it has a sting, and the legs of the worker are provided with "honey baskets," which carry pollen.
Fig. 249.—Bees: a, queen; b, drone; c, worker.
Fig. 250.—Sting of a bee.
Bees are of several kinds, queens, workers, and drones, there being a division of labor. The queen is the largest, the drone is the smallest, and it has no sting. The history of the bee and its development is one of the most wonderful chapters in the whole story of animal life. Glancing at the interior of a hive we see that the bees have constructed a series of hexagonal cells. To learn how they have accomplished this, we may follow a bee in its flight. This may be one or two miles from the hive, yet so perfect is the knowledge of the bee of direction, that it is rarely lost. Reaching a flower it sucks out the honey, which it swallows. It then takes pollen, the dust from the stamen of the flowers, and stows it away in little baskets attached to the legs. It also takes a waxlike substance called propolis from buds of various trees, which it packs with the pollen in the baskets. Arriving at the nest, the bee, with countless others, engages in the construction of the cells, which are of various sizes. The material for building up the cells is wax, which is secreted by the bees, appearing in little flakes under the abdomen, from which it is taken by the legs of the bee. This is the material from which the comb is made, while the propolis is employed as a cement to attach the cells together, and for various minor purposes. Think of thousands of workers bringing in this material, working in the dark, yet never making a mistake. The bee finally ejects the honey which it has swallowed, placing it in certain cells, where it is sealed up and remains until it is needed as food. The pollen is also placed in cells.
A single community of bees may consist of two hundred thousand individuals. In the hive there is a single queen, which often lays from fifteen hundred to two thousand eggs a day, and if we could follow her, we should find that she lays the eggs in different cells, and in cells of different sizes. In the first are eggs which develop into workers, and in the second are larger eggs which will produce males, called drones. The little eggs soon hatch into white grubs which are carefully fed by the workers with digested honey and pollen. Finally the young larvæ almost fill the cells and then stop eating. The workers cover them in, and each spins for itself a silken cocoon, in which it remains until it breaks out in the form of a perfect bee.
The workers build certain large cells on the side of the comb, which are called queen cells, and the larvæ which appear in them are fed with some peculiar food which produces queens. The workers watch each of these cells with great care, gnawing the wax away on top so that they can observe the progress of development. Finally a small hole is made, through which the proboscis of the young queen protrudes, and in this way it is fed for several days, during which it utters a low, piping noise. The queens attack each other on sight, and previous to the appearance of a young queen the old one, with thousands of followers, makes her escape, or swarms. Then the workers liberate a young queen, and if there are others, there are repeated swarms, each queen leaving with a multitude of followers, till the hive has but one queen. There are in the community now a number of drones, and as they appear to be an expensive and worthless burden to carry during the winter, the workers attack and kill them, throwing them out of the hive.
