438 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 196 



are all sterile females produced from fertilized eggs, the drones are 

 normal males but come from unfertilized eggs. This is a curious 

 condition for which the geneticists have explanations, but we may here 

 be satisfied with the facts. If the workers do sometimes lay eggs, 

 being unfertilized they produce only drones. A colony of thousands 

 of insects working together must do some of the same tilings that we 

 do, but the bees do them by methods very different from our own. They 

 have, for example, no spoken language, but they must communicate, so 

 they have a language of their own, two languages in fact, one a chem- 

 ical language, the other a sign language. The workers have tools 

 for various purposes, but their tools are parts of their bodies and are 

 never mislaid or lost when wanted. The bees have the capacity for 

 learning things they need to know that instinct cannot tell them. For 

 example, they learn to recognize their own hive by observing land- 

 marks, and they learn the position of food in the field. Their ability 

 to retain what they learn implies that they have a faculty akin to 

 memory ; but we do not know the mental mechanism of the bees and 

 cannot assume it is anything like our own or that bees have any 

 degree of consciousness. The behavior of insects in general appears to 

 be automatic reactions to sensory stimuli. 



In nature the honey bees construct vertically hanging combs with 

 horizontal cells on each side. In the hive colony the beekeeper 

 expedites the work of comb building by furnishing frames of comb 

 foundation stamped Avith hexagonal facets the size of the natural comb 

 cells. The workers then hang themselves up in curtainlike clusters 

 and complete the cells. Their building material, wax, is discharged 

 from glands on the underside of the abdomen into pockets from which 

 the bees extract it. In the completed comb, cells designed for the 

 brood occupy the lower part and cells for food storage the upper part. 

 The brood-comb cells are of two sizes. The queen now lays fertilized 

 eggs in the smaller cells, mifertilized eggs in the larger ones. She 

 retains throughout her lifetime a store of live spermatozoa in a small 

 sac, the spermatheca, opening into the egg passage. She first inspects 

 a cell by thrusting her head into it, then turns around and lays an egg 

 in it. It has been supposed that the size of the cell determines whether 

 the egg is to be fertilized or not, but this does not explain how the 

 queen regulates the discharge of sperm. A recent idea is that sense 

 organs on the antennae activate or inhibit the mechanism of sperm 

 ejection, but probably the matter is still the secret of the queen. In 

 any case, fertilized eggs develop into female workers; unfertilized 

 eggs into drones. 



When the eggs hatch, the younger workers already present in the 

 hive assume the role of nurses whose duty it is to feed the larvae. For 

 this duty they are provided with glands in the head that secrete a rich 



