Insect Stories

by Vernon L. Kellogg

However, to return to Fuzzy and her work in those first eight days spent all inside the house. One day Mary saw Fuzzy stretching her head down into one open cell after another in the brood-comb. At the bottom of each of these cells was a little white grub; a very young bee, of course, only one or two or three or four days out from the egg. Several days before (it takes only three days for a bee's egg to hatch) we had seen the beautiful long slender-bodied queen moving slowly about over these cells, with her little circle of attendants all moving with her with their heads always facing toward her. She would thrust her long hind body down into one of these empty cells and stand there quietly for two or three minutes. Then draw her body out and go on to another. And in the cell she had just left we could see plainly a tiny seed-like white speck stuck to the bottom of the cell. It was an egg of course. That is nearly all the queen does; she simply goes about all through the spring and summer laying eggs, one at a time, in the nursery or brood-cells. There is one other thing she does, or really several things, at the time of the appearance or the birth of a new queen. But that will come later.

We do seem to have trouble keeping to Fuzzy and her life, don't we? Well, when Mary saw Fuzzy sticking her head down into the cells with the bee-grubs in, she knew at once what Fuzzy was doing. For it was plain that the young bees had to have something to eat and it was plain, too, that they couldn't get it for themselves, for they have no legs, and can't even crawl out of their cells. Fuzzy was feeding them. She would drink a lot of honey from a honey-cell, and eat a lot of pollen from a pollen-filled cell, and then make in her mouth or front stomach (for bees have two stomachs, one in front of the other), or in certain glands in her head (it doesn't seem to be exactly known which), a very rich sort of food called bee-jelly. Then she sticks the tip of her long tongue into the mouth of the helpless, soft-bodied little white bee-grub and pours the food into it. After the bee-grub is two or three days old, the nurse bees—and that is what Fuzzy could be called now—feed the babies some honey and pollen in addition to this made-up bee-jelly, unless the baby is to be a queen bee, and then it gets only the rich bee-jelly all the time.

Mary thought Fuzzy should have a neat cap and white apron on and drew a clever little picture of Fuzzy as a nurse. But we are being very careful in this book not to fool anybody, and if we should print the picture Mary drew, some people would be stupid enough to think that we meant them to believe that the nurse bees wear uniforms! We say right now that they don't, and that you can't tell them from the other bees except that most of them are the younger or newly issued bees and hence haven't lost any of their hair, and so look "fuzzier" than the other bees in the hive. For just as with Fuzzy, so with the other younger bees; they stay in the hive for a week or more and act as nurses.

When they once are allowed to go out, and begin bringing in pollen and honey, however, then the new bees are ready to do any of the many other things that have to be done inside the hive. One day Mary saw Fuzzy standing quite still on the floor of the house, with her head pointed away from the door and held rather low, while her body was tilted up at an angle. She just stood there immovable and apparently doing nothing at all. Suddenly Mary called out: "Why, what has happened to Fuzzy? Her wings are gone!" I hurried to look. And it did seem, for a minute, as if Mary were right. Which would have been a most surprising and also a most terrible thing. But my eyes seemed to see a sort of blur or haze just over Fuzzy's back, and I bade Mary look close at this blur with her sharp eyes. And Mary solved the mystery.

"She is fanning her wings so fast that you can't see them," cried Mary. "And here is another bee about two inches in front of Fuzzy doing the same thing; and another," called out Mary, who was greatly excited. And it rather did seem as if these bees had gone crazy, or were having a very strange game, or something. Until I made Mary remember what would happen to us if not just three or four or five or six of us, but many thousand—indeed in Fuzzy's house there are more than ten thousand—were shut up in one house with but a single small opening to let fresh air in and bad air out. For bees breathe just as we do, that is, take fresh air into their bodies and give out poisonous air. And then Mary understood. Fuzzy and the other bees fanning their wings so fast and steadily were ventilating the house! They were making air-currents that would carry the poisonous air, laden with carbonic-acid gas, out of the door, and then fresh air would come in to replace it.

And another time Fuzzy kept Mary guessing a little while about what she was doing. We had looked all through the crowds of nurses and wax-makers and comb-builders and house-cleaners without finding Fuzzy. And we decided she was out on a foraging trip, when Mary caught sight of our white-spotted chum loafing about in the little glass-covered runway that leads from the outer opening into the house proper, a sort of little glass-roofed entry we have arranged so that we can see the foragers as they alight and come in, and the various other things that go on by the door. Fuzzy seemed to be loafing, but both Mary and I have seen so much of the feverish activity and the constant work of bees in the hive, and out of it for that matter, that we never expect to find a worker honey-bee really loafing. They literally work themselves to death, dying sometimes at the very door of the hive, with the heavy baskets of pollen on their thighs, the gathering and carrying of which has been the killing of them. Only the bees that over-winter in the hive must have some spare moments on their hands. And here in California even these are few, for a certain amount of foraging goes on practically all the year round.

But Fuzzy did seem to be loafing there in the entry. Until Mary's sharp eyes discovered her important business. She was one of the warders at the gate, a guard or sentinel told off, with one or two others, to test each arrival at the entrance. As a forager would alight and start to walk in through the entry, Fuzzy would trot up to it and feel it with her sensitive antennæ. If the newcomer were a member of the community, all right; it was passed in. But if not,—if it were one of the vicious black Germans from the other observation hive that stands close by, opening out of the same window indeed,—there would be an instant alarm and a quick attack. Two or three Italians would pounce on the intruder, who would either hurry away or, if bold enough to fight, would get stung to death and pitched unceremoniously out of the entry. Or if it were a stray yellow-jacket attracted by the alluring odor of honey from the hive, one of the same things would happen. One day not a single German came, but an army, a guerrilla band intent on pillage and murder. And then there was a grand battle—but we must wait a minute for that.

There were also other enemies of Fuzzy's glass house besides German bees and yellow wasps. There is a delicate little moth, bee-moth it is called, that slips into the hive at night all noiselessly and without betraying its presence to any of the bees if it can help it. And it lays, very quickly indeed, a lot of tiny round eggs in a crack somewhere. It doesn't seem to try to get out. At any rate it rarely does get out. For it almost always gets found out and stung to death and pulled and torn into small pieces by the enraged bees, who seem to go almost frantic whenever they discover one of these innocent-seeming little gray-and-brown moths in the house. And well they may, for death and destruction of the community follow in the train of the bee-moth. From the eggs hatch little sixteen-footed grubs that keep well hidden in the cracks, only venturing out to feed on the wax of the comb nearest them. As they grow they need more and more wax, but they protect themselves while getting it by spinning a silken web which prevents the bees from getting at them. Wherever they go they spin silken lines and little webs until, if several bee-moths have managed to lay their eggs in the hive and several hundred of their voracious wax-eating grubs are spinning tough silken lines and webs through all the corridors and rooms of the bees' house, the household duties get so difficult to carry on that the bee community begins to dwindle; the unfed young die in their cells, the indoor workers starve, and the breakdown of the whole hive occurs. Such a thing happened in this very glass house of Fuzzy's a year before we got acquainted with Fuzzy herself. And we had to get a new family of bees to come and live in the house after we had cleaned out and washed and sterilized all the cracks and corners so that no live eggs of the terrible bee-moth remained.