ANIMAL SOCIETIES — SNODGRASS 439 



food material known as royal jelly, which is discharged on a small 

 plate of the hypopharynx between the bases of the mouth parts. 

 Worker and drone larvae are fed for 2 days on royal jelly and are 

 then given honey and pollen. When the larvae are full gro-^n and 

 ready to change into pupae, the cells are closed with wax cappings. 



For the rearing of queens the workers construct a few large cells 

 hanging vertically from the edges of the comb. In these cells the 

 queen deposits a fertilized egg, and the issuing larvae are fed entirely 

 on royal jelly. An ordinary young worker larva will develop into a 

 queen in a queen cell, and it is generally supposed that a female larva 

 becomes a queen on account of the rich diet she receives. The honey 

 bee queen, however, is not a perfect female bee, as is the queen bumble 

 bee. She has greatly developed ovaries, but she lacks the food glands, 

 wax glands, and pollen-collecting apparatus of the workers. The 

 larva in the queen cell therefore must receive some inhibitory substance 

 along with the royal jelly, but what this may be has not yet been 

 discovered. 



The last duty of the workers is foraging outside the hive for nectar 

 and pollen. Nectar sucked from the flowers is retained in the crop, a 

 saclike enlargement of the esophagus, and is thus transported to the 

 hive, where, mixed with saliva, it becomes honey, which is then stored 

 in a comb cell. Pollen, scattered over the bee's body from the flowers 

 visited, is first scraped back to the hind legs, where, by a special ap- 

 paratus on the base of the tarsus, it is packed into baskets on the outer 

 sides of the broad femora and carried to the hive. All this the workers 

 know how to do without learning or training. What a fine thing it 

 must be to know by instinct, and not have to go to school to learn a 

 trade or profession. 



Still more remarkable is the way foraging bees coming to the hive 

 with a load of nectar or pollen are able to tell tlie other bees where 

 they got it and how to find more of the same. Here they make use of 

 their sign language, supplemented by their chemical language, which 

 has been translated for us by Von Friscli into German and rendered 

 into English (Von Frisch, 1955) . 



It would make too long a story to go into all the details by which 

 Von Frisch learned the sign language of the bees. Briefly his re- 

 sults are as follows. The foraging bee on returning to the hive 

 either with nectar or pollen, after depositing her load, makes a run- 

 around on the comb, called a dance. If she has not been far from the 

 hive she wildly swings around in small circles, now to the right, then 

 to the left. The surrounding bees become greatly excited, follow 

 the dancer, and touch her with their antennae. Thus they get the 

 scent of the nectar or pollen adhering to her body and rush out to 

 find the corresponding flowers. If, however, the forager has been 



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