1896-97-] Bees: A Year's Work in the Hive. 211 



days in the nymph state, when it emerges a handsome and 

 perfect queen, having only taken fifteen days to become what 

 will very likely be the mother of nearly, if not quite, one 

 million children. The queen will leave the hive in from three 

 to five days to be mated, and never again quits it except in 

 swarming. The worker leaves the hive to fly from the ninth 

 to the fourteenth day, and the drone about the same time. A 

 queen will live for five years, but the extreme age of a worker 

 is nine months, though during summer it does not live for 

 more than six weeks or two months. I have noticed an entire 

 change, in the population of a hive in six weeks. As a rule, 

 drones live about two months, except in a queenless hive, 

 when they may live for four or five months. 



Now as to the furnishing of a hive, this is generally done 

 about the month of June — I mean, in natural cases. When a 

 swarm has come off, if left to themselves it is very hard to say 

 where the bees may want to take up house, for it may be in a 

 hole in an old tree, or on the roof of a house, or in an unused 

 chimney, or in a church steeple or belfry of any kind, in all 

 of which places I have seen bees. But for convenience we 

 shall suppose our swarm in an old straw-skep or hive. The 

 first thing the bees do is to set up a chemical factory. Each 

 bee, on leaving the hive, is laden with honey, so, clustering in 

 the top of the hive, they raise the temperature to such a degree 

 that the honey by some chemical process is converted into 

 wax, which exudes in thin scales from between the first and 

 second and second and third rings of the under side of the 

 abdomen. These scales are picked up by the bees and carried 

 by them to the top of the hive, where they are kneaded into 

 a solid mass and stuck on the top of the hive in a thin ridge. 

 After this ridge is formed a number of bees set to work to 

 construct the cells. In a common skep they generally begin 

 three or four combs, and there seems to be a general under- 

 standing that they are all to run in one particular direction — 

 that is, parallel with each other. The bees who are making 

 the cells scrape the wax out of the bottom and build it upon 

 the edge of the cell, which is always much thicker at the edge 

 than the walls farther down. They are also very good at 

 measuring distances, for they usually put the combs \\ inch 

 from centre to centre, except for storing honey, when they 



