THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VI. 427 



this has since been discovered to be a "queen" instead. The queen is 

 the only perfectly developed female in th colony and hence lays all the 

 fertilized eggs. She can lay at will an egg that will produce a male or 

 female bee. A prolific queen will lay at the height of the breeding sea- 

 son more than double her own weight in eggs every twenty-four hours. 

 Good authorities claim to have had queens that would lay an average of 

 six eggs per minute. This would be over eight thousand eggs per day. 

 A queen that cannot be induced to lay over three thousand eggs per day 

 usually gets her head pulled off and is superseded by one that will. 



There are good and bad bees just as there are good and bad cattle 

 The wide-awake apiarist will weed out those that are not profitable and 

 will replace them with something that is profitable. 



The queen is fed by the worker bees who keep her supplied with egg- 

 producing food in the right amounts and she lays because she has to. 

 She is not so much of a queen after all since she is not a ruler in any 

 sense of the word, gives no commands, directs no movements, orders no 

 work. She is not allowed to be idle but is fed by the rest as a sort of 

 machine to produce eggs for the propagation of the race. The queen does 

 not eat plain honey from the comb cells as do the other bees, but is fed, 

 or rather stuffed, with a granular secretion very similar to the milk of 

 mammals. This granular secretion is produced by the young bees and is 

 fed to the queen and the young larva. The glands that produce it are 

 useless when the bee is old enough to work in the field. The queen pro- 

 duces no wax but has a sting which she uses only on a rival queen, either 

 in the hive or outside. The queens fight on sight and to y finish It is 

 intensely interesting to watch them fighting a duel. 



In the hive will be found several thousand smaller bees, known as 

 workers, which are really incomplete or dwarfed females. Their office is 

 to do the work of the hive and to bring in the food from the fields for 

 the needs of the colony. It used to be said that bees did not make honey 

 but gathered it. If man can be said to make sugar, then bees can be said 

 to make honey. The nectar when first gathered is from eighty to ninety 

 per cent water but when converted into ripe honey most of the water 

 is absent. The chemist calls honey an inverted sugar or grape sugar. 

 It used also to be supposed that bees manufactured wax from pollen and 

 honey chewed together. Wax is a secretion on pretty much the same prin- 

 ciple as fat is a secretion of the ox. The first condition necessary to wax 

 secretion is a well filled stomach. Honey gathering and comb building 

 go on simultaneously and when one stops the other ceases. When nec- 

 tar no longer abounds in the field, it is wisely ordained that they should 

 not consume in comb building the store they might need for wintering. 

 The wax secreting organs, present only in the workers, are on the under 

 side of the abdomen, four on each side called wax pockets, in which the 

 wax is formed in tiny scales. It is interesting to watch the bees at comb 

 building. They take the tiny scales of wax from the pockets and join 

 them on the edges of the combs they are building. 



Three sizes or kinds of comb cells are built — worker cells, drone cells 

 and queen cells. There are fifty worker cells to the square inch and 



