STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 63 



zing noise. What is that for? It has been found that if you 

 remove him from the top of the nest another one will take his 

 place. The first explanation was that the reason he appears 

 there is to wake up the rest in the morning. We know, of 

 course, that with us it requires one member of the family, 

 usually, to wake the rest up in the morning. That was thought 

 to be true of the bumblebee, but it is not the case. The real 

 explanation seems to be that those bumblebees coming back 

 at night loaded with food from clover and other plants and 

 lying there in the nest all night make the air impure so that the 

 nest needs ventilation, and the first thing in the morning it is the 

 business of the largest bees to mount to the top of the nest and 

 fan their wings and get air currents so that the nest will be 

 ventilated. The same thing takes place all the time in the 

 honey bee hive. Ventilation is carried on by the bees fanning 

 their wings. 



We have here a very interesting bee, not a native of this 

 country, but you see the life is much more complex. This 

 comb is made to hang from a branch of a tree. Above you 

 have the cells made for the storing of honey, below you have 

 the cells made for the workers, in which the workers grow and 

 develop, and finally come out and do the work of the colony; 

 you have the large drone cells, much larger than the others, and 

 at the bottom you have the large queen cells. I can tell you a 

 very interesting thing about the honey bee. Just as soon as the 

 ■workers find they have no queen in the hive they set about to 

 produce a queen. How do they do that? They build one of 

 these large cells from a small worker's cell, they begin to feed 

 that young bee inside, wormlike now in form, a peculiar kind 

 of food called royal jelly and they soon develop there a queen 

 bee simply by feeding this young a dififerent kind of food. 

 You will notice of course that the queen cell is a good deal 

 thicker and heavier. That is to protect her from the cold. 

 The temperature must be kept constant in this hive. 



This shows you the real honey bee hanging as the one shown 

 before. It has been found that bees will live out-of-doors. 

 They do not have to have hives in which to live, and indeed 

 they can pass through the winter, a very cold winter, hanging 

 out of doors with no protection whatever. Form.erly of course 

 they lived out of doors. A little later they lived in the trees 



