8r6 



Home Nature-Study Course. 



Fig. I 



Fig. 2 



Fig. 3 



of her closed wings. (Fig. p. 78, i.) She has no pollen baskets or pollen combs 

 on her legs, because it is not a part of her work to gather pollen or honey. The 

 queen bee starts life as an ordinary worker egg; this o^gg is selected by the worker 

 bees for development; the partitions of the cells around the cell in which it was laid 

 are torn away and a large projection is built out over the top. (Fig. p. 78, 4.) As' 

 soon as the tgg hatches into a little white grub it is fed for three days on the 



same food as other 

 worker larvae ; then 

 a special substance 

 secreted by the work- 

 er bees, called royal 

 jelly, is fed to this 

 favored larva. This 

 food is very nourish- 

 ing and develops the 

 larva to its fullest 

 extent. After being 

 thus fed for five 

 days the cell is 

 sealed and the larva 

 weaves around her- 

 self a silken cocoon 

 and changes to a 

 pupa. When she 

 changes from a pupa 

 to a full-grown bee 

 she cuts a circle in 

 the cover of the cell 

 and finds her way 

 out. Her first work 

 is to hunt for other 

 queen cells and if she 

 finds one she usually 

 makes a hole in its ' 

 side and stings to 

 death the poor prin- 

 cess within. If in her 

 first walk she finds 

 another full-grown 



The Honey Bee III.— r, Oueen Bee, enlarged; 2, Drone; ^"^^" ^^^^ t'^° ^sht 

 J, Worker; 4, Queen cells. until one succumbs. 



The queen never uses 

 her sting upon anything or any one but a rival queen. After a few days she takes 

 her marriage flight in the air where she mates with some drone and then returns to 

 her hive and begins her work as the mother of a colony by laying eggs in the cells. 

 She runs about on the comb, pokes her head into a cell to see if it is ready, then 

 turning about thrusts her abdomen in and neatly glues an egg fast to the bottom. 

 When the honey season is at its height she works with great rapidity, sometimes 



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