ECOLOGY 2 8 1 



fatherless and hatch out only drone bees or males. Such a colony soon dies 

 out, since no new workers can be raised and the life of a busy worker in 

 summer is only five or six weeks. Workers hatched late in autumn live 

 over winter, and do a few weeks' work in spring. To get rid of laying 

 workers, one has only to shake all the bees out of the hive in a grassy place, 

 a hundred or more feet from the original position of the hive; the regular 

 workers will easily find their way back to the old stand; the laying workers 

 never having been out of the hive, can not get back and will perish. Then 

 the helpless, eggless colony will accept a new queen, if one is offered to it. 



Workers alone have mouths for collecting nectar and the honey-carrying 

 crop. They also have combs on their front legs especially suitable for comb- 

 ing pollen off their bodies. The second pair of legs has a notch through 

 which the first legs can be pulled, to gather up the pollen; and the hindmost 

 legs have each a little basket in which the pollen is placed and carried home. 

 Workers differ greatly in their use of this natural equipment. Some return 

 home all dusty with pollen, and let their sisters clean them up. Others enter 

 as neat as a pin, with huge sacks of pollen on their legs. 



Last summer a loaded worker entered an observation hive and presently 

 walked along one side of the comb, then went over to the other side, 

 rambled about over and through and under a cluster of bees, looking into 

 various cells here and there and, finally, after several minutes, settled on 

 a place to unload. She put her hinder legs deep into a cell, and remained 

 for about a minute; then she pulled them out, leaving her two lumps of 

 pollen loose in the cell. Immediately, another worker went in head first 

 and remained for about a minute. When she came out, the pollen was 

 tightly and smoothly packed in the bottom of the cell. The bee which lost 

 the time in deciding on a place for depositing her pollen was t)*pical, for 

 most bees seem always to be just milling around aimlessly over the comb. 

 Do not send the sluggard to the busy Httle bee to learn a lesson in efficiency. 



Observers remark the same characteristic when the bees are building 

 their marvelous comb. They run about without any semblance of order 

 or continuirs' of work. A bee bites at the comb here, sticks on a bit of wax 

 there, and runs on while others follow. But meanwhile the marvelous comb 

 grows up before our eyes! The wax is secreted in scale-like pieces on the 

 under side of the abdomen of the workers. To produce the wax they eat 

 vast amounts of honey and hang in characteristic clusters over night. The 

 wax appears in a few hours. Bees consume about twelve pounds of honey 

 to make one pound of wax, but one pound of wax will build enough comb 

 to contain sixteen pounds of honey. The cell of the comb is not only 

 hexagonal — a response to the nature of the space in which we live — but 

 its axis slopes upward, so the honey will not drip out. There is, therefore, 

 a very definite right side up for honeycombs. 



There are three sizes of honeycomb cells. Most of the cells are almost 

 exactly one fifth inch in diameter. As long as the queen lays eggs in the 



