The Habit fi of the Honeybee 9 



stage being- known as the pupa stage. For drones the 

 time is twenty-four days. 



About the time the drones begin to appear, the 

 inmates of the hive begin to prepare for swarming", 

 which, to any one w^atching the habits of bees, is one 

 of the most interesting things which takes place in the 

 colony. The workers now begin to make queen-cells. 

 In our previous description of the development of the 

 young from the egg, nothing was said about the queen, 

 and there are some decided differences in her growth 

 which we will not take up. 



As Avas stated earlier in this article, the queen and 

 the workers are all females. Schirach, an old authority 

 on bees, discovered that the bees could take a young- 

 worker larva soon after it hatched from the egg, and, 

 by giving it special food all during its larval life, 

 " royal jelly," and, by constructing for it a special 

 cell, make of the otherwise worker larva a fully de- 

 veloped queen. This it is that the workers of a colony 

 do when they are preparing to swarm. Several young 

 worker larvae are chosen as the material for queen- 

 rearing, generally located near the margin of the comb. 

 The workers now begin to feed these chosen larvae an 

 extra amount of food, and at the same time the sides 

 of the cells containing them are remodeled and enlarged 

 by the destruction of surrounding cells. The queen 

 (or royal) cell is nearly horizontal at the top, like the 

 other cells of the comb, and projects beyond them ; but 

 then the workers construct another portion to the cell 

 into which the queen larva moves. This is an acorn- 

 shaped cell placed vertically on the comb, about as 

 large as three ordinary cells. As the cell is being built, 

 the queen larva continues to grow until tlie time comes 

 for her to be sealed up and enter her pupa state. Al- 



