208 FAMILIAR FEATURES OF THE ROADSIDE. 



northward through Campton to the Franconia Notch, 

 we will be sure to find the Italian honeybee busily 

 engaged there. It is always the worker bee, never 

 any other, and we can only call her a female in a 

 limited sense of the term, as the queen or mother 

 bee is the one perfectly developed female in the 

 hive ; she only lays the eggs.* The worker, we can 

 easily see by a glass, is busy dipping her long, triple- 

 shaped tongue in the nectar. This she draws up 

 by the trough-shaped middle division of the tongue, 

 and it is conducted into the honey-sac (the equiva- 

 lent of a stomach) ; on the way it undergoes a chem- 

 ical change from cane sugar to grape sugar. This 

 is accomplished by the admixture of a salivary secre- 

 tion of the bee with the flower nectar. The bee's 

 stomach is furnished with muscles which enable her 

 to compress it and thus ejaculate the honey into the 

 comb cell. We will see, therefore, that honey by 

 the time it reaches the hive is no longer simple 

 flower nectar any more than a raw oxhide is shoe 

 leather. 



But honey is not the only thing which the bee 

 gathers, and Watts did not record in his familiar 

 verses the other important part of her work ; she 







* Very rarely, however, when a colony has been queenless for 

 some time, a few workers are sufficiently developed to be capable 

 of laying eggs ; but these eggs only produce drones. (Langstroth.) 



