2«4 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE3 Off. Doc. 



the inhabitant of each. All young bees are fed on this royal jelly, 

 which is a secretion from glands in the head of the workers, only 

 during the first three days of their lives, after which they are fed 

 on thin honey and pollen or bee bread, and then they develop into 

 workers instead of queens, as they would have done if fed ditferently. 

 Bees do not make queens except when their queen is lost or infirm, 

 or about to swarm. 



The structure of the bee is important, as the protection of the 

 bee-keeper depends on it. The bee has two kinds of eyes, one known 

 as the ocellus or simple eye, which is a large single lens, three of 

 which are placed iu the head. The other is the compound eye, which 

 consists of a great number of lenses placed together to form one 

 eye at each side of the head. It is known that bees have very ac- 

 curate far sight and fine near sight, and it is thought that one of 

 these eyes is for seeing objects at a great distance and the other for 

 seeing them at very close range. The bee keeper takes advantage 

 of this and can stand fairly near the hive and is not attacked, while 

 objects twenty feet away, or even more, receive the attention of the 

 angry bees. The tongue of a honey-bee is generally about one- 

 fourth {^) inch long. While an effort has been made to breed longer 

 tougued bees in order that they may reach the bottom of the red 

 clover tubes, this has not been accomplished as yet. The sting of 

 the bee is attached to a poison sack, and is also provided with muscles 

 to force it into objects. Owing to the backward barbs on its tip 

 it is frequently left behind and causes the death of the owner. If 

 the sting be removed immediately after it is inserted, but little poison 

 passes through it, but if it be left for some time it continues to go 

 deeper into the skin of the victim, and the muscles continue to work 

 and force the poison through the tube and cause considerable pain. 

 In removing the sting the operator should be careful not to grasp 

 and squeeze the sting and thus force more poison into the flesh, but 

 should scrape it away so that the poison will not be squeezed through 

 the hollow dart from the poison sack. Applications of ammonia, 

 soda and water, essence of lemon, or other substances will relieve 

 the pain of the sting, but the bee-keeper soon becomes almost im- 

 mune to stings and works with the bees with bare hands without 

 fear of being stung occasionally. 



The legs of the worker bees are provided with bags for carrying 

 the pollen, which becomes the bread of the young. In their diges- 

 tive tract they have the honey sack, which is not the stomach, where 

 they carry the nectar which they gather and make it into honey 

 by the addition of a little formic acid. When the bees reach the 

 cells in which the honey is to be stored they disgorge the precious 

 burdens through their mouths. 



By a peculiar arrangement of the reproductive organs, the fer- 

 tilized queen bee is able to lay worker eggs or drone eggs at will. 

 This is because the eggs which are fertilized hatch into queens and 

 workers, and those which are not fertilized produce only drones. 

 The queen mates but once in her lifetime, when flying high in the 

 air, and the fertilizing element is retained in a small sack at the 

 side of the duct of the ovary. When laying the egg, a small portion 

 of this is permitted to reach each of the worker eggs, but in laying 

 the drone eggs this is held tightly in the closed sack. 



The queen commences to lay eggs in the middle of the oomb, near 



