“Farmer Joel isn’t exactly going to catch the bees,” explained Daddy Bunker. “All he can do is to follow them until the queen bee lights on a tree branch, or some place like that. When she does, all the other bees will cluster around her, as thickly as possible. Then, if Farmer Joel is lucky enough to find them, he can take an empty hive, put it on the ground under the queen bee and the bunch of worker bees, jar them off into the hive, clap the cover on, and bring it back to his apiary.”
“What’s an ap—an ap—ap—?” began Violet.
“An apiary means a place where bees are kept,” explained Mr. Bunker. “It comes from the Latin word apis, which means bee. Now while we are waiting to see what happens I’ll tell you a little about bees and why they swarm.”
The six little Bunkers looked at Farmer Joel, with his smoking machine and his mosquito netting hat, still following the slowly moving swarm of bees toward the woods, and then they turned to their father who had promised to tell them something better than a story.
“Bees are of three kinds,” said Mr. Bunker. “There is the worker bee, of which there are thousands in every swarm, or hive. The drones are the father bees, and, I am sorry to say, they are a lazy lot. They never work, and they eat lots of honey, and sometimes, when too many drones, or father bees, get into a hive, the worker bees sting them to death, for they can’t afford to feed too many lazy bees that won’t work. Then, most important of all, is the queen bee.”
“How can you or Farmer Joel tell one bee from another?” inquired Violet, and this time the other children were glad she had asked the question, for this was something they wanted to know.
“The queen bee is larger and longer than any of the others,” answered Mr. Bunker, “and even you, not knowing anything about bees, could easily pick her out of hundreds of others. The drones are a little larger than the workers, and the queer thing about the drones is that they never sting. They have no stings and cannot harm you. The queen can sting, but she never does, or hardly ever; for once a bee stings, it leaves the stinger in a person or an animal, and that means the bee dies. And it wouldn’t do to have the queen bee die.”
“What would happen if she should die?” asked Russ.
“That is taken care of by the worker bees,” said Mr. Bunker. “In the cells, or little holes in the wax honeycomb, are many eggs that after a while will hatch out into other bees, mostly workers or drones. The queen bee lays the eggs that hatch into other bees. But if it should happen that the queen should die, the worker bees at once begin to feed to some of the half-hatched little bees a peculiar kind of food gathered from the flowers. It is a sort of mixture of honey and juices from the bees’ bodies. This is called royal food, royal honey or queen bread. And when the half-hatched little bees eat this strange food they are changed from ordinary bees into queen bees.
“But as there can be but one queen in a hive, if more hatch out all but one are killed, and so the life in the hive goes on. The new queen begins laying eggs, and more drones, workers and perhaps more queens are hatched. The workers fly off to the fields to gather honey from the flowers, and they also gather something else.”