230 A SOCIAL INSECT— THE HONEYBEE 



the thousands of bees that belong in the hive to pass through, at the 

 same time keeping out strange bees which might be bent on robbing. 

 If a bee from another hive does attempt to enter, she is seized by the 

 guards who pull her around by her legs and wings until she is glad 

 enough to escape. If the intruder persist she may be stung to death, 

 but this rarely happens. It would seem to be an impossible task to 

 distinguish a foreign bee from the many thousand bees that belong in 

 the hive. Yet this is done easily by the sense of smell ; each hive has 

 its own peculiar odor which is imparted to all the bees living within it. 

 When they suspect enemy infiltration, the guards will seize each bee as 

 she arrives. If she smells like a resident, they will let her pass, but 

 they will notice the strange odor of a robber bee and drag her roughly 

 away from the entrance. 



Further evidence that bees recognize each other by the sense of 

 smell is furnished by the method used to unite two weak colonies in 

 order to make one strong hive. A layer of newspapers is placed over 

 the first hive and the second hive is set directly on it. By the time 

 the bees have eaten holes in the paper, both sets have come to smell 

 alike and they mingle together peacefully. If the two hives had been 

 united directly, there would have been a fierce battle with many of the 

 bees being injured or killed. One of the queens can be removed in 

 advance or both left to fight it out for supremacy, since no queen 

 will tolerate a rival for long. The queen bee is not injured when she 

 stings since she can remove her sting with ease. A worker bee, on the 

 other hand, has a barbed sting, and when she flies away, after stinging 

 a victim, not only the sting and the attached poison sacs but often most 

 of the digestive system are pulled out of the unfortunate insect. As 

 a result the worker bee is capable of only that one sting and soon dies. 



Duties of Field Bees 



From the point of view of a beekeeper the most important activity of 

 the honeybee is the collection of nectar. After a bee has completed its 

 tour of duty in the hive, she becomes a field bee and retains this position 

 for the rest of her life. Field bees can be divided into three groups : 

 water carriers, pollen carriers, and nectar carriers. The majority of bright 

 colored flowers have nectaries which secrete a sweet fluid. The male 

 organs of flowers, the stamens, produce large quantities of pollen. Bees, 

 visiting the flowers to collect one or the other of these nutritious sub- 

 stances, accidentally carry the pollen from one flower to another, thus 

 cross-pollinating them. This is a case of symbiosis between members 

 of two different kingdoms, the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. 



