WASPS, ANTS AND BEES 



185 



The hive-bee has long been a domesticated species of animal, 

 and several different varieties or races of it have been created 

 by artificial selection, the more familiar ones being the German 

 or black race, the Italian or amber race, and Carniolan or 

 striped race. As the life of the honey-bee is not only one of 

 the most interesting of all animal lives, but is one which the 

 economic zoologist needs especially to know, we give in the 

 following pages a rather detailed ac- 

 count of the natural history of the 

 honey-bee, mostly taken from Chapter 

 XV of "American Insects," by the sen- 

 ior author. 



The Honey-bee. A community of 

 the hive-bee, which may live, of course, 

 not in a hive at all, but in a hollow 

 tree, as undoubtedly was the habit of 

 the species in wild state (the "bee- 

 trees" of America, however, are inhab- 

 ited by bee colonies which have swarmed 

 away from domesticated ones and are 

 only wild by virtue of escaping from 

 the slave-yards of their human mas- 

 ters), consists normally of about 10,000 

 (winter) to 50,000 (summer) individuals, 

 of which one is a fertile female, the 

 queen; a few score to several hundred are 

 males, the drones; and the rest are infer- 

 tile females, the workers. These three 

 kinds of individuals are readily distinguishable by structural 

 characters. The queen has a slender abdomen one-half longer 

 than that of a worker, she has no wax-plates on the underside 

 of the abdominal segments, and no transverse series of comb- 

 like hairs, the planta, on the underside of the broad first tarsal 

 segment of the hind feet, and no pollen-basket on the outer 

 surface of the hind tibia. The drones, males, have a heavy 

 broad body excessively hairy on the thorax, and lack pollen- 

 basket, planta, wax-plates, and other special structures of the 

 workers. The workers are smaller than queen or drones, and 



FIG. 88. Bumble-bee 

 at clover blossom. 

 (From life; natural size.) 



